Fri, Dec 9- No, We're All Cool
Aren't we, all cool right now? Yeah, sure, we all saw the trump collect electoral votes, and somehow he'll be our president next year, doncha know. And he's shown that he can't possibly be that guy, but a little less than half the country wants him wants him wants him, no matter how unsuitable, no matter how many lies, they want him because they hate hate HATE the other side, they want him, and it don't matter how much he lies cuz He Never Lied and She Always Lied, dot dot dot

Quite indeed. All Bob the Angry Flower can do is step out and decide who or what or how is more Fri, Dec 2- Aw Bejimmeney

A couple of weeks past our common horror, I wish I could have something pithy and erudite to present. I, as the author of Bob the Angry Flower, must better have something to say immediately. If not, then why bother with Bob the Angry Flower at all?

Damn, I wish I had strength and common courage to stand up among you all who hope to fight.
Maybe I might later on, next year, when it's not so much of a time to sit down and be lazy. I wonder if I might maybe stand up next year. Honestly, I don't know.

Putting extended fears and expectations asides for, fuck, I guess, a week, up above is a cartoon, see what you think.
Fri, Nov 25Fri, Nov 18 - A Whole New Woooorld
I wish I was updating this update
along a-fantas-tic point of viewwwwwwww,

No-one to tell us no
Or where to go
Or say we're only dreaming

A whole new worrrrrld

A dazzling place I never knew

But when I'm way up here
It's crystal clear

That Now I'm In a Whole New World..... with youuuuuuu.

Funs aside, and the singing going on on on and on and on and....

let's partake in a much more correct and shitty current way of looking at things, all of us, liberals and Trump-voting shitheads alike, and let's us all engage in someFri, Nov 11 - Well Here We Are
I don't have a bunch of time to talk about the new Election right this section. Folks have given plenty of words, I'll just drop last weekend's thoughts, let's continue to figure, shall we? Regardless, let's us all consider Fri, Nov 4Fri, Oct 27 - So Close!
Oh man, oh man, it's less than two weeks! Eleven days and we can kiss this wreteched election season goodbye forever, or at lest until 2018. I guess I should be sad, as a cartoonist and sort-of current events funmeister, that the era of making fun of the Reuplican nominee is (we pray!) drawing to a close, but I just want the whole mess behind me. I'll find my jokes the old-fashioned way; by making them up! Like so:Fri, Oct 21 - Done Debating
Whew. I don't know about you folks, but I am relieved as hell that we're finally past the debate phase of this grim, grim election season. True, it's a bummer that there are still 2 and a half weeks left, but the end is now firmly in sight. So, with a bit of the pressure off, it's time to check in with the United Nations and welcome our soon-to-be best pal, Fri, Oct 14 - Has it really...?
Seriously, has it really only been a week since the last update? The last time I was typing up one of these, we hadn't even heard the whole "Grab the Pussy" awfulness, and the second presidential debate, with Trump vomiting up garble and lies and demented threats and looming behind Clinton like a murderer in an underground car park, was three days yet to come. Has all that really happened in a week? Gah, it seems like forever, and we still have three and a half weeks left. Can you believe that Doctor Strange actually comes out in theatres before the election? I can't. And yet it does.

So, I drew this strip after the "Grab the Pussy" business but before the actual debate. On the surface, it has nothing to do with the election. But look a little deeper, and I think you'll find that it does! In any rate, this one's called

Shin Godzilla
I managed to catch one of the weirdly rare North American screenings of Japan's newest Godzilla film, Shin Godzilla, or Godzilla Resurgence, depending on your translation, and it's a doozy. It's the first Japanese Godzilla film since, well, the first Japanese Godzilla film to not assume the existence of the original film from 1954. So, for the first time in over 60 years, Godzilla shows up and Japan doesn't know what to do.

It's a strange Godzilla film from almost any angle. For one thing, it's not fun. The first film was a true horror film, genuinely and seriously intended, but then all the others have had some degree of science-fictional or science-fantastical or kid-friendly whimsy. More to the point, Godzilla is usually appealing; he may not be a hero, exactly, but he's at least an anti-hero, a presence, a personality you can identify with. Not here. Godzilla is ugly, a nasty thing, appearing first as a belly-crawling psuedo-zilla with too-large googly eyes that seem silly at first but rapidly become disturbing, then metamorphosing into a volcano-cracked nightmare with tiny eyes you can barely see and jaws that split open like those nasty uber-vamps in Blade 2, vomiting death and fire. I've loved Godzilla and giant monsters since I was a kid, but this Godzilla, while not as directly murderous as the Gyaos from Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is a giant monster who takes the fun out of giant monsters.

That's not to say Shin Godzilla is bad, not at all. It's just not a popcorn-crunchy laffathon at the movies like we expect. When Godzilla isn't on screen being horrible, we spend the rest of our time in dense satire with the highest levels of the Japanese government, meditating on the cabinet-level legal ramifications of a radioactive monster attack and the various restrictions under which the Japanese military can act. It's good stuff, if you're interested, endless committee meetings and ad-hoc strategy groups gearing up in bland high-ceilinged workspaces, laying out orderly rows of tables and chairs and laptops and printers in an all-hands-on-deck attempt to prevent a giant invulnerable transforming tadpole from laying waste to Tokyo.

Shin Godzilla is getting an extremely patchy North American release: only in a few cities, for a few screenings, for a few days. But if you're a Godzilla fan and you have access, you really do owe it to yourself to check it out.
Fri, Oct 7 - Callback
Yep, folks, dear readers, this week's Bob the Angry Flower cartoon is a callback. What... What IS a callback, some of you might ask, even as other rolled their collective eyes with the obvious knowing of call backs. And indeed, new readers and old are lilkely able to figure out what a callback is. Indeed, that's why I like you folks so much; you get things.

So, without forcing additional ado on anybody, let's just take a quiet moment and remand ourselves toFri, Sep 30 - Symphonic!
This pretty much has nothing to do with the cartoon of the week or anything else that happened in the last seven days like, say, the presidential debate, but I just back from the symphony! Symphony-going is a bit out of the way of my typical diversions, but a friend had an extra ticket and invited me, and darned if it wasn't pretty good. Heard some Strauss, heard some Elgar, heard some Dvorak... neat stuff. The crazy bit was that the seats were dead center in the front row, so we were pretty much as close to the musicians as they were to each other. Some of them make the craziest faces as they play!

Anyway, here's this week's strip, a little ditty I callFri, Sep 23 - After All
Woof, yurf, readers, I'm plenty messed up this eve as I write this update. However! I have an excuse, which is that September 22 is the date that I've held my whole life as the date of my birth! Can I confirm it-- with video? Can I ever really know if Semptember 22, 1970 was the true day that I emerged into this world? If my Mom was still alive, I could ask her. But she's not. If my Dad was still alive I could ask him, or at least ask him if he had any of the documents. Nope. Neither of them are alive to help me out on my quest to figure out if I actually was born in Edmonton, September 22, 1970. Luckily, the hospitals did write that shit down, and I have a bit of documentation from them in the form of a birth certificate. Whew!

and just about as crappy a place you could put a newborn child, legally, as anyone could. But, you know, I hear that Hillary Clinton is a big fat liar -- haven't you heard the same thing?

Putting all the above yammer aside, if you've come to angryflower.com today, you're here to see another cartoon. And another cartoon you will see. It is, today, this one:
Fri, Sep 16 - Fall Crawl
To the extent that this particular set sets its up on a thing --to the enxtent that it could, two months from now, we could all (United States Americans) find ourselves living in a set of United States which had somehow personally, individually, and with awful respect to the electoral college, somehow elected Don the Con as president-- to that extent, I want to take a moment to draw and post a cartoon about just how shitty it gets when we say "Yep!" to all the rich fuckers that want to do nothing more than simply drain productive wealth from all who create it.

Given all the above poop, let's just us all think about ourFri, Sep 9 - Some Times
Last week I mentioned that I'm feeling kinda politicked out at the moment. You know how it is: you spend all the time worrying about whether some ridiculous con man is going to become President of the United States, and your mental health starts to suffer. So as was the case last week, so is it true this week: no politics! Just the yummy numminess ofFri, Sep 2 - Tek tek tek tektektektek
Yeah, time goes on, as this web site has been tirelessly, endlesslessy boring about. Last week was August; this week is September. It's not only almost as though fall HAS come, it's as if fall IS come!

Given that we're all in the fall season fall, and political stuff is facing us at the goofy sticky bottom of our delightful rollercoaster ride around the Sun's illresistible sin wave, let us take a brief second to take a brief second to consider stuff that's not about our politics, our relationships with each other, or our terrible, terrible flaws, and let's instead imagine a better world, a world made crisper and more reliable, one in which not only Bob but all of us can confidently look down at ourselves and see, without concern, our new Fri, Aug 27 - Still A Lot Mad
About what, readers might ask? What am I still mad about? Well, I'm most curently and again upset about how the Republican Senate, led by Senator Mitch McConnel, has continued to refuse to perform their Constitutional duty by going full stop on the bit of the Constitution that says:

"He (the President) shall have the Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments."

I have no doubt that folks that dislike the current executive dislike the obligation to seat Supreme Court justices -- a number that, by Congress, must be no more or no less than nine. And I'm sure they hate that the Constitution obliges them to provide Advice and Consent to the President's nominees. And right now, as far as I can tell, they're just refusing to perform their part of their Constitutional duty because they simply don't think that the current President is actually president. And I'm pretty sure that they will never admit why they think the current president, Barack Obabma, doesn't have the right to appoint those Supreme Court justices. But let's fuckig face it, folks: they think they can get away with pretending the president isn't the president because he's, yknow... not white. Black, even.

I was upset about this a few months ago when I drew this cartoon:

But that seem not to be the thing any more. So then let's view something new, New, NEW, with this impossible strip!Fri, Aug 18 - I Don't Even Know
Whoof, sorry folks, it's been a few weeks since I blatantly admitted that I was updating the site on the rainbow rounds and fluffy hills of drunkening.

And yet, damn it, here I am, this early Friday morning, with nothing to present other than a brand new fierce and yet unacceptable Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, one that should be accompanied by many many many many words to say.

All these complaints and irritations and assertions of illegetimacy... I honestly don't know what to do. I'm typing this now and I feel I'm dropping the words I really need to offer a full description. It's almost as though there was some large force, some elemental power roiling around in the back of our brains, as though our full personal assertions of ourselves were somehow being broken down and shattered by Fri, Aug 12 - Change it Up...
Not in any kind of super crazy way, mind you, but a little. A teensy. An itsy. Just aFri, Aug 5 - Just Like That...
... it seems like the current Republican nominee has finally crossed the invisible "Chirst, what an asshole" line it seems he should have crossed a thousand times before, and now a clear majority appear to have concluded that he is, indeed, an asshole. I don't know if Americans don't take to slamming dead soldiers, or maybe they just thought he was being a dick to that baby, or what, but at least for now his poll numbers look to be in the freefall they should have been in the whole time. I sure hope it sticks, because I really wasn't looking forward to holding my nose and supportingFri, July 29 - And Back
Well, that was Comic-Con 2016. A bit slow for me this year, so I don't really have anything incredibly exciting to report. Thanks to all the folks who came by the table, though; you cats are the best! Next year should be a bit peppier, though, since it will be, incredibly, the 25th anniversary of Bob the Angry Flower and I'll have a new book of madness for an unsuspecting world. Should be nutz!

But that's a little bit in the future, so for now we're just going to have to content ourselves with a brand new cartoon, like so:Wed, July 20 - SAAAAAAAAAAAAN
Diego! Yep, it's another San Diego Comic-Con, this year 2016! This year, as has been true many years in the past, I'll be at a corner of the Small Press Area, table K16 on Aisle 1400! Swing by, if you're there! Buy a book or two! Hell, buy TWENTY books! You know you have 20 friends who would love them.

It's late Tuesday, gotta get up and pasck and git on in the airplane, so I'll just pop in a new Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, one touching on the themes and ideas of trustworthiness and faithfulness, in only the best and most honestest of ways. Readers, I haveFri, July 15 - Dammit the Comical Con
Yep, next week is, for all intents and purposes, the San Diego Comic-Con. Those likewise {like me} weak cartoonists scramming themselves to get there, (me included!), are gonna arrive and try to show all the folks there that our comics are worthwhile. We'll arrive and set up our tables. I at least, I will arrive and set up my table. The cartoonists who truly care and who have spent their last year or years working hard and harder, they will appear with all their astonishing stuff.

For those lucky enough to actually get to attend the San Diego Comic-Con, I urge you to experience the poop out of it. If your experience hope is to see the one thing in Hall H or the Ballroom B or whatever it's called these days, to see and hear the stuff an hour or two before everyone else hears... well, go for it.

If your San Diego Comic-Con experience is *not* built around getting there first, then I definitely suggest you roam around a bit to see some of the off-brand stuff. Stuff like, for example, Bob the Angry Flower cartoons found at Aisle 1400 in the Small Press Area!

Regardless, whether or not this site's dear readers are attendees or non-atendees of the San Diego Comic-Con next week, I still have no choice -- and no better obligation-- than to present this particular week's strip, this one called

Stay in touch, readers! There will absolutely be another update before the Monstros at San Diego!
Fri, July 8 - Scheduled
Hey, folks, quick update this week. I know I'm months late to the party, but I've been busy watching a trainwreck, so I've only just now found the time to schedule the all-importantFri, July 1 - Canada Day!
Hey, everybody, it's Canada Day! Wooooooo! Yeah! Canada Day! Best day ever!

Of course, living in Seattle as I do, I don't get much opportunity to celebrate Canada Day, and only realized it, in fact, WAS Canada Day when a friend off-handedly mentioned it. No, here in the US of A the big day is July 4. YEAH! 4th of July, bitchez! WOOOOO! Maybe gonna get some hella fireworks and set 'em off, or shit, maybe just go acquire myself a full-on firearm! We love 'em here in the States, yes we do! From what I hear, they're fun, make loud noises, and simply can't be beat for providing constant, round-the-clock, unimpeachableFri, June 24 - Post-Solstice
I hope everyone enjoyed last week. I'll say that, on my trip to northeren Alberta to attend the North Country Fair, I enjoyed precious little of it. I and my friends were subjected to truly unpleasant winds and rains on our arrival on Wednesday. Half of us had rain gear while the other half of us were soaked to the pants and shoes. We ultimately retreated to a steamy jeep to warm up.

I refused to exit my tent on Thursday until all the rest of the crew had built a full-on manta ray of weather protection. I crawled out and joined my hardworking compatrioats, and together we experienced all the flies alive. I sucked on Thursday, but I was around when our dear friend Mr. Tits arrived later that day.

Friday was a bundle of weathers and peoples and walks down to the stages where we ordered and ate just about the best bacon cheeseburgers ever created.

Saturday... I'd rather not say too much about Saturday, other than to say I was peeled from my tent, pressured to attend a 6:30 trip, liked and hated the trip to our place of sacredness and solitude, trudged back, slept, gulped some acid and then fought SkyGods, made fun of everybody, laughed, slumped, drank and kept awake, all the while not doing a single thing to help our camp arrange a fire.

Given all that, it was simple to spend all Sunday snoozing. Monday Morning was a deconstruction of our camp, and then the trip back to Edmonton --started right around noonish-- has three hilarious stops as Fish's Van overheated and forced us to halts.
Hillary-arous!

Given all the the above and all you folks' fun, I don't dare to present a cartoon, and yet I do. I present this one, it'sWed, June 15
Fair, the Country North
Oop, sorry folks, sorry for being a bit out of schedule. I'm heading up north to the North Country Fair this weekend, and that means that this update has to happen a bit early. So, all y'all, I hope you like your forthcoming weekend, and please enjoy while you're doing it someFri, June 10 - Bye Bye Bernie
Yep, it looks like Bernie Sanders is not going to become the Democratic nomineee for President. Of course, it's looked like that from the start, so it's not as though this is some huge surprise. But man, there sure seem to be a lot of incredibly bitter folks out there. I mean, yeah, I liked Bernie for Pres, but Democratic primary voters preferred Clinton. That's what happened. Bummer, but there it is. I know if I was an ardent Bernie supporter I'd be tempted to raise a proud and angry middle finger to Clinton, but I honestly think that would be a biiiiig mistake. She may represent a highly compromised status quo, but I can't help but prefer that to, you know, a demon-blasted hellscape.

On a completely different subject, how about a cartoon? How about this one?Fri, June 3 - So Quick
Golly, is it really June already? I suppose, after carefully consulting the date printed in the site update headline above, that I must agree that, yep, it's June!

June 2016, to be precise, a time in the universe that will never happen again (unless you listen to those dingdongs that say everything is infinite, which, yeah, means that everything happening right now has happened an infinite number of times in the past and future, along with every other possible thing, so why the fuk bother?).

So, celebrating this very particular June, I hasten now to present a branded and new Bob the Angry Flower cartoon strip, this one!Fri, May 27 - Let's Not
And by Let's Not, I mean let's not have Donald Trump as president as the United States. Let's just... not. But if, as a result of Clinton's weakness as a candidate or some other goddamned reason, we end up there, then we might as well sit back and enjoyFri, May 20 - Zzzzzz....
Sorry, folks, I haven't gotten nearly enough sleep in the last few days, so I'm about to pass right out. Hence, this update is going to be limited to a quick and/or dirty presentation of this week's strip, to wit:Fri, May 13 - Turrible, turrible
Yep, lots of stuff has been terrible, turrible, and just straight awful this last week. Fire stormed in from the wilderness and burned at 80,000 some people's lives, with hopes of salvation and serious angry damnation splurping out onto the media that we cal social. Meanwhile, the entire world convulses in disgust and horror at the Trump's current ascendence, as though it never should have been and yet we're all looking at it, hurrified, with terrible sense of the now and guilty feelings of the future. In all that nonsense and gimmble-dee-gop, here's a simple cartoon that lays it all out, and describes our best posture, which is to beFri, May 6 - Into the May
Putting aside all cartonery nonsense, I'd suggest that anyone who wants to help people in northern Alberta who don't know even if they have homes any more, click this link and hand cash over to the Red Cross. It's the best way to help.

Stupid movies
Do I really want to see another Captain America movie? Wierdly, yes I do. For all that folks said again and again about how modern audiences couldn't possibly sit still for a Superman who embodies Truth, Justice, and the American Way, I want to see a hero take a swing at that. I doubt that I'm alone, either. For all the insistence that nobody wanted to see Superman being what we always thought Superman should be, I want to see somebody be that. And if the man in the movies who is that turns out to be Captain America, well, then... let's find out.

It Burns
Meanwhile, horrors are way off these days, and while we have many to worry about, and many terrors that folks are pissed and freaking about, I do take a moment of cartoon space and cartoon time to just chit-chat about
Fri, April 29 - Come on, May
I think I've probably used "Come What May" as an update title already, seeing as how that's the title of one of my favorite songs to hear and sing from the motion picture Moulin Rouge.

So, instead, this May we get a slight variation of the theme, and it expresses itself this constant instant as

Fri, April 22 - New Yoak, New Yoak
Well, here we are a week, more or less, after the New York primaries! And what have we all to accept?

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton's triumph seems complete. I, as a Bernie booster, would love to think that maybe he could win. I may even drop a few more dozens of dollars to Bernie's efforts. But I'm currently busy accepting Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, I watch the monkey cage with square wheels trundle and rattle along. I hoped to have orang-u-tans and gibbons and serious actual monkeys go wild nuts at the Republican convention, with the clattering expectation that Trump's hairpiece would be ripped from his head and flung across and in front of so many cameras. That is to say, I'm crossing my fingers and flesh for a contested convention.

Will that happen? Will the Drump arrive at the convention, scraping just parely past the delegates needed for a first ballot? Or just a bit behind? Oooooh... I suppose we will simply have to see.

Regardless of all'o that, the week comes along and insists on another Bob the Angry Flower cartoon. And as it does, and as it insists, here we find

Fri, April 15 - Updated!
Whoo, hey, look's like it's another Friday Bob the Angry Flower web site update, an dsince my computer helpfully restarted itself just as I was finished writing up a big post, but just before I saved it, I have nothing to offer this week other than a feeling of being a bitFri, April 8 - The Party, Late To It
What can I say? I was at WonderCon two weeks ago, and I'd done a strip ahead of time for the week following, so it was only last weekend where I was in a position to draw a cartoon about our most recent national nightmare. And then -- wouldn't you know it?-- all the outrage and disgust reached fever pitch and blew itself out, leaving satirists and shit-talkers like me out in the cold by a week, bitching about a movie that everybody (rightly!) is all bitched out about. Well, what are you gonna do? At least I got to put Bob in some funny hats and wigs.

And with that stellar, most confident introduction, I hereby present:Fri, April 1 - Sickly Sic
Sorry, folks, to say that I'm sick, but sick I am and sick I've been, sick enough to call in sick at work not just once but twice, consecutively. I'm on the upswing from the second day of illness -- my coughs no longer feel like they feature broken glass, my sniffles aren't a nosefull of an open tap of dribble, my body is not shaking and shivering and sweating in equal measure-- but at the same time, I can hardly state that I'm well. So, I'm going to update this here site as quite as possible, and go to bed, and so I'd just like to point out thatThur, Mar 24 - Wonderful WonderCon
Hey, folks, it's WonderCon weekend coming up! What is WonderCon, you ask? Why, it's a three-day comic convention held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in --if you can believe it-- Los Angeles! INSANE! And what's even insaner, I will be there, WonderConning along with the best and the worst of them. I'll be in the Small Press Area, table 111, on Aisle 1000. If you happen to be in L.A. this weekend and find yourself attending a fun comic convention, you shoul TOTALLY swing by and say hello! It's the American thing to do.

Speaking of Americans and Americas, I'd like to take this opportunity to stress thatFri, Mar 18 - Not St. Patrick's Day
Nope, it isn't. That was yesterday! I'm pretty sure it was, anyway; I seem to recall hearing a lot of people saying so. Given that it's not in any way St. Patrick's Day, let's not put up a cartoon that has anything to do with it. Let's instead, submit for your perusal this object of whimsical cartoonery:
I, like everyone else, really have no idea what to make of Donald Trump. I don't even know if I fully believe what I'm accusing him of in the above cartoon. I just don't underrstand why all these folks who are getting screwed over by big-money asshole billionaires seem to embrace this particular big-money asshole billionaire. Sure, he's open about being one, but I just con't get why people seem to think that means he's on their side. Why would he be?
Fri, Mar 11 - And here we go
Ooof, folks, I've been going back and forth on how political all the strips have been. I wish I coud control how, and to what extent, poltical those strips have been. I wish I could control it. The only thing I can control is how lazy a strip is, and how much it's supposed to be about something else.

Given all that, and my horrifying disinterest in actually talking for real about any of what's going on right now, I do not have any choices.

All I can do is turn the cartoon over to some of our previous friends, and then simply state a story ofFri, Mar 4 - Tra-la-laaah
You know, I'm feeling a bit burned out on all this 2016 election business, and I'm feeling like I'd just like to take a break for a bit. How about you folks? Care to take a break with me? Let's just sit down, maybe grab a hot chocolate and a pillow, lean back and appreciate some delightfulFri, Feb 26 - Truths
It's certainly been an odd few weeks on the ol' campaign trail, hasn't it? All kinds of spooky stuff has been going on, now that people are actually starting to vote. To be honest, I'm kind of over it all, and I wish I could just engage the services of a Fri, Feb 19 - Again with the politicking
Well, last week's cartoon was a bit on the current-events side, and I'm afraid that the same is true for this week's. Furthermore, this one is pretty on-the-nose about its point, which I really try to avoid. For some reason I just can't help myself when it comes to Ted Cruz. I find him loathsome in a way I never found even Dubya or Cheney. Indeed, one could say that, in terms of his overall grossness, I consider himFri, Feb 12 - And then and then
Whoa! Whoops? Wa-heyy! Welcome, angryflower.com readers, welcome welcome.

I haven't been piss drunk for the last set of updates since before the Christmas Holidays. Or have I... Let me check...

Urf-golly! I can't be sure! I definitley posted plenty of nonsense over the last bit, but was it full-on drunken nonsense...????

Regardless, it's clear nobody knows. So, in the meantime, I'm going to post this current-events cartoon, one that's all about the conflict between the Bernie and Clinton sides of the Democratic side of our helpless hopeless political system. It's a cartoon guaranteed to be three days out of date, and then decades out of date. But I had to draw it anyway, and it had to be all about our various forms ofOof, I broke the page
Somewhere in the last couple of weeks I uploaded the wrong index file, so I ended up getting pasted onto the page from a year or two ago. DAMMIT! Luckily an alert reader tipped me off, so there's not too much lost. In fact, I think I only lost one post and that one was forFri, Jan 29 - Shivers
There's been a lot of talk about Donald Trump during this bizarre, hallucinogenic GOP primary race, and I understand it. Trump is a molten gorgon, a sweaty buffoon of awfulness, but it's hard to deny his gross, sticky magnetism. To my mind, though, he's not the worst of the bunch. For me, at least, that dishonor goes to Ted Cruz, who looks like he's waiting for a sniper to start taking shots at him so he can grab a baby and hold it up in front of himself as a human shield. I'm not sure why I have this visceral dislike of the guy. I mean, yeah, his policies are loathsome, but that hardly makes him unique among Republicans. There's something about him; in a fundamental way, he simply doesn't seem

Fri, Jan 22 - Full On
After having pooped out a pile of anti-new-StarWars bibble last week, I'm gonna take a breather, by which I mean a nap, by which I mean an affirmation against doing any more work other than to share this week's cartoon-strip about a book and a TV show that evidently nobody gives a shit or load about, a book and TV show called Childhood'S End even as my lame commentary title for the strip is thus named

Fri, Jan 15 - What Matters
Lordy, this sure has been a rough week for anybody who doesn't enjoy beloved public figures dying on us. I drew this cartoon last week before the death-glut, so it really has nothing to do with any of it. It's simplyBack from the Stars War
I begged off last week in sharing my thoughts on the new film, saying that I hadn't really assembled a full and proper thesis to expound. I still haven't, but I'll do a bit of rambling on the subject, anyway.

A friend of mine had a great metaphor for this movie, so great I'm gonna steal it. He described it as a beautifully wrapped present, but when you unwrap it, it's an empty box. That's how I felt about Star Wars: The Force Awakens. On the surface it seems appealing, but it's completely hollow. Visually, logically, thematically... there's just nothing there.

Before I start rambling about all the things I found to be disappointing, I'll get out front about what I liked. Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega... they were good. I'm not terribly thrilled with how their characters were conceived and developed, but all these young actors were game and delivered what they were given. Kylo Ren stopping the blaster bolt was cool. Seeing the Millennium Flacon scrape clumsily along the ground was kinda fun. I liked the bit, early in the film, where Rey slides down the sand dune towards her speeder; it's the one part of the film that seemed to have an identity of its own. And... that's pretty much it for stuff I liked.

My first complaint, and one that's been made by many people many times in the weeks since the film's release, is that it's just so grindingly, relentlessly unoriginal and unimaginative. It's pure nostalgia product, and more specifically, it's nostaliga product drawn from the original trilogy and designed to repudiate the prequels. You want Original Trilogy Han and Leia and the Millennium Falcon and a Death Star and X-Wings shooting at TIE Fighters? Then that is what you shall receive. Say what you like about the prequels, but George Lucas made sure that each one had vistas and planets and monsters and robots and aliens you had never seen before. Were they all successful? Hell, no. But Lucas let his imagination out to play with its new CGI toys. This film simply didn't. Visually, it polished up the safe and familiar and fed it back to us.

But it's not just unoriginal and unimaginative, it's also insubstantial. It feels exactly like every other J. J. Abrams joint, an endless string of contrivances and coincidences and goddamned flashbacks created to get in and out of scenes and nothing more. Take Finn. The notion of a stormtrooper who balks at participating in a mass murder? Cool! How is that going to be developed, how is the story going to explore what that would be like, the kinds of struggles this guy must be having? Oh, it won't be? It's not going to? Finn's going to just pop out of his armor and start cracking wise and running around whooping and hollering like a Star Wars fanboy off the street? Huh. And how about Han? The story drops him in and he's exactly like we remembered him, making jokes and scoundrelling around and delivering callbacks to the original trilogy like the last 30 years never happened -- and these are 30 years in which he and Leia had a son who turned into Darth frickin' Vader! That's a huge story, one far more compelling and dramatic that anything we get here, and it's introduced and backfilled with a few lines of dialogue.

It seems to me like there are two stories here. There's Rey and her search for Luke Skywalker, and there's Han & Leia and their catastrophe of a son. Neither of these stories seem to have much to do with each other, and both of them feel like they're assembled on the fly. Rey has no reason to give a shit about the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker until she has her lightsaber flashback halfway through the film. I know, I know; there are all kinds of revelations about her past and her parentage that will come in the next film and the film after that. But that doesn't change the fact that, in this film, she picks up her motivation and character objective like she's grabbing a bag of chips at the gas station on her trip to Calgary.

And as for the Han/Leia/Kylo story... okay, sure, I'll grant that certain things were outside of Abrams' control. He couldn't go back in time 15 years and tell the compelling story between Force Awakens and Return of the Jedi when it would have made sense to do it. And he pretty much had to have some kind of passing of the torch between the heroes of the older stories and the new heroes of these new films. So maybe this was the only way that story could go, and he did the best he could.

But man, Han and Leia just felt to me like caricatures of their characters from the original trilogy, not actual people who had aged and been immeasurably changed by all that had happened to them in the interim. Maybe it's me, but I simply didn't feel it. It was pretty much exactly how, in Abrams' Star Trek: Into Darkness, the film expects us to buy into a scary Khan and an emotional death scene between Kirk and Spock, not because the film has done anything to earn it, but because it can just rely on our memories of older, better stories.

Feh. I could go on and on, and if any of you are interested, here's a podcast I did with MF Galaxy podcaster Minister Faust in which we did exactly that. Suffice it to say, I got what I expected from this movie: a new appreciation for George Lucas and the his Star Wars films.
Fri, Jan 8 - Newy New
Yep, it's 2016 on this here Earth of ours, and that means it's time to wrap up, for once and for good, this silly, silly story that's been going on here at angryflower.com. May I present to y'all

Star
Wars?
Yeah, I saw the new movie. I haven't yet fully built out a whole thesis on it, so I don't have one to present. I mostly just have a lot of small observations that I'm busy shaping into a coherent picture. But I will mention that I basically fell asleep the first time I watched it. I was more alert during subsequent viewings, but yeah... I think it's safe to say I wasn't super banger thrilled. The Hateful Eight was waaaaaaaaaaay more entertaining, for me at least. And that's all I'll say for now. Happy New Year, folks!
Fri, Dec 18 - But Suddenly...
Hi, folks! This is the last angryflower.com update this year!

If I was smart I'd have a whole PHP web system designed to deliver content over several weeks according to how it's supposed to play out. However, as I'm sure you all suspect or frankly know, I'm not smart. So instead we're gonna lay stuff out like this:

Here's this week's continuation of the astonishing tale we've been experiencing over the last 3 weeks. I guarantee it's a major twist!

And then, given that exciting turnaraound, all you angryflower.com readers should expect another week before the next exciting instalment! But because you're such loyal angryflower.com readers, you get this next instalment right now! Even though it's specifically timed to be read a day before Christmas 2015, you can read it right this second here (though in truth, you should wait a week to read it):

And it contnues! You loyal angryflower.com readers get one last sneaky preview before 2016, and it's this:

And what of after that? Wellll... we're all gonna have to wait, I'm thinking. Have yourselves a lovely holiday and a burgeoning New Year!
Fri, Dec 11 - And then...
The mystery! She deepens! DEEPENS, I say! Just when we thought we'd seen all there was to see of Herman Polenta, a cartoon arises, a cartoon that's been given the hideous name ofFri, Dec 4 - Oho!
Well, well, well... what's all this, then? Is this some kind of cartoon about well-known 1940s industrialist Herman Polenta, of whoem we saw mention in last week's strip? But what on earth more could there to be to say about this august figure? What additional mysteries could be in store? Let's find out... together!Fri, Nov 27 - Thanks Given
Oof, full of foods and wines. I'm going to post this cartoon about polenta. It's calledFri, Nov 20 - Aftermathing
Well, I'm not really sure about this week's strip. I will say that Vue up in Edmonton chose not to run it, and I'm not sure I can blame them. And yet, even though it's kind of tasteless and unduly flippant, it still kind of meant something. I dunno. Here it is, maybe you folks can figure it out.Fri, Nov 13 - See Sons
Well, not seasons, per se, but the natural consequences of our yearly whippins-around our star, our odd conglomeration of entropy-spewing hydrogen, from whose nips we suck all day all night all winter all summer. SO! Let's engage!

Fri, Nov 6 - Debaste
Hey, folks, did y'all happen to catch the latest Republican Candidates' Debate last week?? What a show! And so enlightening! I feel a great sense of pride and satisfaction that this nation has so many inspiring choices for conservative leadership, offering so many nuanced and thoughtful solutions to our problems. It is in that spirit, then, that I offer my own humble contribution to the discussion. Please enjoyFri, Oct 30 - Hello Ween
Yikes! Eek! Spoked! And then some! The Hell-O'-We'en celebrations run toward us as fast as they can, instilling fear, buttressing despair, investing deep in horror futures. What can we do? Can we possibly resist? May we turn this tale around?

My guess is no, not today. Today and tonight and tomorrow, we're just gonna have to be and live our scaries, as we've done for years and generations past.

So, here's some creepy cartoonery, an image deep in the very fire and bowels of evil, a strip calledFri, Oct 23 - Aftermath
So last week we had the election in Canada, and the cancerous Conservatives were deposed, praise Allah, though at some considerable cost to the federal New Democratic Party. Folks seem pretty upbeat about our fresh-minted new dreamboat Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, so I guess we can consider it crisis averted... for now.

In other news, my stomach hurts from (I suspect) some ill-advised fried sushi earlier this evening, so I'm going to put up this week's cartoon as quick as I can and conmmence the convalescing. So, here's

Fri, Oct 16 - Helpy Help
Okay, so for non-Canadian readers, a little background. There's an election going on in Canada at the moment. The current governing party, the Conservatives, have been having a bit of a rough time of it, what with having done a really crappy job on pretty much every point for the last ten years. In an effort to get folks to support them anyway, they decided to roll out some good ol' fashioned bigotry, stoking Canadians' anti-Muslim anxieties by emitting pear-clutching concerns about Canadian Muslim women's wearing of the niqab. Specifically, they're proposing that for these women's own sake, it'd be best to prohibit the niqab in citizenship cermonies and in the public service. Naturally, Bob is eager to do his part for Canadian Muslim women everywhere, like so:

Fri, Oct 9 - Minus Minus Minus
So, as I explained to a dude last weekend at APE, generally I try not to do a bunch of obscure references in Bob. Well, no, that's bullshit; I do obscure references all the time. But at least I flatter myself in thinking that I provide sufficient context in the strip itself to get it even if you're not familiar with the thing I'm riffing on (even though that self-flattery is, itself, also complete bullshit). But this week, I'm not gonna even pretend. If you haven't heard of Garfield Minus Garfield, this strip won't make a lick of sense. So take a look at that link, get familiar with the idea, and then come back and enjoy the dizzying metanarrative heights ofWed, Oct 7 - Ack!
Sorry, folks, I was so busy getting ready for APE last week, I forgot to upload the index file for that update. Bad Notley! BaAADD Notley!
Fri, Oct 2 - APE it Up!
Yep, it's that time of year again. What time? Why, APE time, of course, by which I mean the Alternative Press Expo. But hark! What's this? It's not in San Francisco anymore? It's in San Jose? MADNESS! But true nonetheless! So if any of you faithful readers happen to be in sunny San Jose this weekend, come on by the San Jose Convention Center and drop by! Sadly, I'm not right up front any more, but you can find my booth easily enough through the use of its number... which is 263! That's deep down the rightward central aisle on the right side. There's a map and everything! See you there!

Meanwhile, before I head out, I figure I might as well drop a cartoon on y'all, so I shall, and it's this:Fri, Sep 25 - Hmmm
I'm not sure if this week's strip,
is about anything in particular. But then again... you never know. Sometimes we end up with Bob the Angry Flower cartoons that I'm confident are absolute nonsense, and then a week later I realize it was some damn fool clear expression of an event or process or anxiety I simply hadn't noticed before. So... I don't want to say it's totally about nothing this time around. I've been burned on that score before.
Fri, Sep 17 - And How It Goes

I watched the Republican debate on CNN two nights ago. I had a whole bunch of reactions, to wit: Carly Fioriana came out on top. She did so by doing two things. She shut Trump down. Not once but twice.

1) She destroyed him on his earlier remarks about her. She did it by waiting for the opportunity -- the debate-- and then hit him with himself and stood back. Once she'd done that, she later on did the second,

2) She announced, without letting him interrupt, his history as somebody who has taken piles of other people's money and then lost it.

Of course Trump spouted what he's always spouted -- that it's not he who went baknkupt (only his companies), and that he was good and smart and got loads of credit from bailing from Atlantic City before it fell apart before everybody else.
But, for the first time, somebody posed to Trump his record of dumping other folks' debts, and made him squirm about what he'd do if he were in charge of America.

Not to say I'm all in on Carly Fioriana. She's a terrifying figure, a monster being with no evident warmth or compassion for anyone. She's *worse* than Trump, far worse. She's not on record as having given a shit about anybody. She's got plenty to say about how much she intends everyone else on Earth to knuckle under to her. But has she even displayed a flicker of kindness? Maybe she has, but holy damn, I never naw a crack in the hate-rage armor last night. She's your terrible mom, or step-mom-, or grand-mom, saying what is right and true and what you must do right now. And why? Cuz she says.

Is there love in there? Compassion? Maybe. Perhaps. But holy shit did Carly not display any during the debate. She struck herself as the Republican Woman, againt Clinton, saying all the hardest tough things againt women that no other Republicans have the balls to say out loud. That women need to quit complaining about thousands of years of historical imbalance. That women should just shut the fuck up about their interests as women, cuz that's just a bunch of special-interest whining. That women need to stop being such helpless sluts getting fucked and whining about how they end up pregnant all the time because right women don't do that. Because she didn't.

Right women did better. Like she did

So shut up, women. Stop talking about women. Quit whining.

Oof, sorry, I'm not liking Carly. Woman or not, she seems like a creature of hate and rage arguing for power for its own sake. She's offering all the arguments for power, whether power over the poor, the young, the black, the female or the anybody else who didn't do what she did. I look at her and I shudder.

Given all that, or nothing besides, how would you folks a cartoon this week? How about this one?Fri, Sep 11 - Terrible True TalesFri, Sep 4 - Not True
I just thought I'd get the non-trueness of this week's strip out of the way at the outset. Bob's predicament, his problem, shall we say, is not one that is actually real in this world. It's not a thing. Still, it's real to him, and in cartoonland, that's the only thing that counts.

Right, okay, now we've got that out of the way, let's proceed to this week's instance of jocularity, a fun little trifle I like to callFri, Aug 28 - Trumped Up
I'm of two minds about the bizarre phenomenon that is Donald Trump. On the one hand, I feel like I'm being trolled, and that any attention paid to his clown act is wasted effort on a ridiculous sideshow. But on the other hand... it's a ridiculous sideshow! It's a clown act! I, like everyone else, can't look away!

So, hitting while the iron's hot, and with great debt to Fantastic Four #1, I presentFri, Aug 21 - Quick quick
Hey, folks, after last week's drunken ramblings, it's gonna be a quick one this time, just a fast divebomb to zoom in and leave y'all trembling in the aftermath ofFri, Aug 14 - I don't wanna know
Before I spooj on this week's updates, I must allow that I'm in into REO Speedwagon's "I Don Wanna Know" as I create the update. So, so don't tell me that you love me, because I don't wanna.......knoooww.

Anyway, let's move on from typing words and sentences into webcartoon updates, shall we? Let's amuse ourselves and others by presenting a brand fresh new shocking difficult striving oldschool lameass WeAllreadyKnowWhatHeHasToSay Bob the Angry Flower Cartoon, by which we mean this week's, by which we mean

Fun, right?

Are We Feeling The Bern?
I think we're closer to it now than we have been.
Last week Bernie Sanders, an unapologetic socialst, arrived in Seattle to boost his message. He accepted an invitation to speak in Westlake as part of a rally about Social Security.
Right before Sanders was scheduled to speak, or indeed, after he'd delivered his first sentence, two young women leapt to the stage. They wore Black Lives Matters t-shirts. They took the mic and insisted that they be heard. They were yelled at by the crowd, and they yelled right back at the crowd. Sanders eventualy left the stage.The rally was shut down in their wake.

Were they bad?
I'll say that when I heard about it, I was hella frustrated with these women. If I'd been there to hear Sanders speak, I'd be boiling with anger that they took over the whole thing without even a scrap of interest in hearing what anybody else had to say. I was reminded of radical folks in my university years who felt that the radical need to be heard meant that you screamed and yelled and said what needed to be said, and if people got pissy with you for raising your voice, you didn't give a shit because all those would-be lily-livered supporters, if they weren't on your side when you got in faces and went big, if they weren't with you, then fuck 'em. They were never there to begin with.
I hesitated about how I should feel about it. I know that there's no such thing as polite social action or waiting turns. The whitehot thing that needs to be talked about must be talked about NOW, and always, cuz otherwise it'll be ignored.
But holy cow, did I not respect their lack of respect. Man, I don't think I would have enjoyed their yelling fiesta if they'd delivered to people I felt really needed to hear it. Calling for answers and refusting to listen... I didn't like that too much.
And then, well, shit, am I the racist that they accused everyone presnt of being?
On that, I guess I have to go, yeah, I am. If I am a pureblood racist because I find yelling and not listening distasteful, if I would have disliked some white goofbats who yelled over people I *(dislked)* and refused to let them speak, and would have felt that was a powerful issue that needed attention but also would have felt that if that had been your rally and a phalanx of environmental activists took *your* mic over and refused anybody else speak on Black Lives because the death of the planet is so much more important and anybody talking about anything else is missing the point and adding to the problem, then yup, I'm that racist.
So, uh, yeah... I'm that racist dink. I won't give blanket approval to all actions taken on the BLM banner. I'll be the white guy deciding how much I approve. I'll be screamed and yelled at and I won't immediately say yes to all complaints. I'm that racist dink.
However, I will say that, after the rally last weekend, Bernie Sanders amended his platform. You can see his general platform here, and you can see his brand-new set of Racial Justice policies here. They're hardly new, in that he's been supporting them for decades, but they'e muore up front than they've ever been. They are deep and detailed. He's been working on them forever, but this event pressed him to go front and center with policies that speak to the horrific injustices that Blacks, and other minorities, in America face in trying to live a fair life. He talks about Racial Justice in terms of Phsyical Violence, Legal Violence, Political Violence and Economic Violence. And the things he's saying apply to pretty much everybody in this damn fool country.
So, to conclude: I don't like people yelling to hold others to account but refusing to let them respond. I like very much that, after getting yelled at, a political candidate amended his platform and took on the problems he was yelled at for. I seriously doubt that the women who broke up his rally will note his change of policy directive or emphasis, because I think that they're ultimately more interested in yelling than in making useful or stategic change. But what the fuk do I know? I'm just a goof-ass cartoonist!
Fri, Aug 7 - Timing
On reflection, I really should have run this week's cartoon
last week, and last week's cartoonthis week, seeing as how the new and seemingly regrettable Fantastic Four movie is coming out today. You can't help it sometimes; you come up with a cartoon and you publish it, timing be damned. But you still feel those regrets that the timing hadn't worked out better.

F Stop
I saw the new Fantastic Four movie. It's too late in the morning for me to unpack all that's in and not in that film. But I will say that there's an aching lack of joy, wonder, amusement, fantasy. It's as real and dead as an iPhone plug that doesn't work any more. Josh Trank, you writer and director of this movie as well as Chronicle and the brilliant The Death and Rebirth of Superman tube on YouTube (**edit: wrong guy; Trank directed Chronicle, but it was Max Landis who wrote it and did the DaRoS YouTube**), I feel for you. Something fell. I've never made even a small movie, and I've certainly never made a multimillion-dollar superhero movie. I wonder how you feel about this motion picture. I know I don't know how I feel about it.
Wed, Jul 29 - The Golden West
Oop, hey folks, check this out: it's an early update this time instead of a late one! Why? Well, it's simply because I'm heading north to attend the glorious Golden West Music Fest in ferociously metropolitan Ardmore, Alberta, wherein there will be much drinking, some discussions, many music-listenings, few food-buyings, two bonfire witnessings, and no doubt a whole host of other phrases that take verbs and plug "ing" onto them to make them nouns. Did I mention they're gonna set a huge wooden dragonfly on fire? I didn't? Really? Didn't I just in the previous sentence but three? Well, no matter. If you can and can will, make your way hence-like to the Golden West Music Fest this weekend. I know I intend to. Fun is required to abound.

That said, why the early site update? Oh, well, given that I'll be up in the severe beauty of the Alberta Prairies right around when I'd normally deliver a site update, I figured I'd get this one done early. So, in anticipation of a movie-film that I wish I could hope and believe in but just don't, here's some risible japing on the subject ofFri, July 24 - Nothing to Say
Yep, just a totally normal, nothin'-special week, with no particular thing to mention or discuss here on The Official Bob the Angry Flower Web Site.

But Wait -- Books!
What am I talking about? I must be mad, to say what I said above. After all, this week for the first time in forever, you can actually order books again! Yes! Check it out!

Yep, I finally did the tax stuff and got the books listed at IndyPlanet. I haven't done BtAF: Pamplemousse, yet, but I'll get to it right quick.

So yeah. Books. WOOOOOOO!

In addition
I suppose you folks are also looking for a cartoon, right? Well, here y'go!Fri, July 17 - Conning
Whew! Well, I'm back from the San Diego Comic-Con. Thanks to all who came out and got spankin' fresh copies of The Unthinkable; I hope you enjoy 'em!.

The con was a little bit more subdued this year, I thought. Maybe I think this because Keith Knight wasn't there for the party this time around, but I think it was just a bit more laid back, not quite so frantic. I attribute some of this to the con's efforts at handling their growth by pushing more stuff outside the convention center, so people aren't packed in the Exhibit Hall the whole time. This leads to a better experience for everybody, I think, since you're not constantly stuck in a sweating mass of humanity the whole time, but it does mean that folks are likely to walk by your table only one or twice rather than 10 or 12 times, so you don't have as much chance to make an impression and draw people back for a sale. A friend of mine proposed a different theory, which was that by having only a very limited number of 4-day passes and breaking the rest of the badges out by day, there's less incentive for people to make the trip from beyond San Diego or California to only see one or two days. A decent theory, I think, with much to recommend it.

By far the best time I had at the con this year was once again getting a chance to hang out with Dan Harmon, he of Community and Rick & Morty and the beloved Harmontown podcast. They had a Comic-Con special recording of Harmontown at the Tin Roof on Sunday evening, and not only did I attend it, I actually ended up as a guest on stage, where I bleated about capital and labor and talked about cocaine. If you're interested, I show around the 57:00 mark, but there's plenty of amusement to be had in the minutes prior. Check it out!

Unthinkable Sales
I haven't yet sorted out how to get The Unthinkable up and mounted on Ka-Blam's Indyplanet site for online purchase, but I've untangled some of the legal and tax tape involved, and I hope to get it set up shortly. So, keep watching this space; Bob books will soon become available again at a scale not seen since the early 2000s! Pinky swear, I promise!

And how about a cartoon? Yeah? A cartoon? Okay, here's

Ant Man
Saw Ant-Man. I don't have enormously strong feelings about it, but I liked it. As many others have noted, it's a smaller scale story (hah), a heist movie and a movie about fractured families. I appreciated what they were going for on both points, but it felt a little... loose, I guess. The jokes were amusing, but they never quite rose to the level of, say, Guardians of the Galaxy. You could see what the motivations were supposed to be for Hank Pym, his daughter Hope and his thwarted protege Darren Cross, and you could see how Scott Lang was trying to get straight for the sake of his daughter, but the scenes themselves ended up feeling more explanatory than dramatic. Same with the heist stuff; heists are supposed to be tight and lean, with split-second timing and narrow escapes, and there were some, but again, they came in feeling just a little loose, like the screws could have used just a bit more tightening. Still, general fun, and once the movie gets around to some serious Ant-Manning in the last third, there are some nice beats and clever moments that leave you essentially satisfied. A solid B, if I were the sort of person to give movies letter grades, which I suppose I must be at least in this instance since I just did.
Wed , July 8 - Packing and Packing
Right, okay, let's see. First we've got this week's strip, a handy little number called

Then, as mentioned last week and reiterated here, it's time for San Diego Comic-Con! Fun for all ages, and you might even find a comic or two! Certainly you will if you come by my table in the Small Press Area, K16, Aisle 1400; you'll even be able to get one of these fresh new entities:

Come on by! It's fun!Fri, July 3 - Pride Goeth
Whoops, hey, folks, sorry about the update being a little late this week, but you know how it is when you start your long weekend early. Canadian readers, I hope y'all had a good Canada Day on Wednesday, and for all you U.S. readers, try not to blow yourselves up or start any raging fires this Fourth of July weekend!

Anyway, it's July, which neans that the San Diego Comic-Con is rapdily approaching. As always, I'll be nailing down a table in the Small Press Area, K16, Aisle 1400, and I'm happy to announce that I'll be selling, fresh off the press, exciting brand new copies of

Yep, it's the 9th Bob the Angry Flower book, featuring more pages, more cartoons and more annotations than ever before! Come by my table and get one for your very own!

Oh yes, and ther's a cartono, a bit late to the Pride Parade, but still.
Fri, June 26 - Return!
Whew! What a crazy weekend I had at the North Country Fair Music Festival in gracious Driftpile, Alberta! Such sun! Many rain! All flies! I've got so many insect bites on my hands and wrists, I look like I've got leprosy. And who knows? Maybe I do! But somehow, just as it is every year, it was worth it. Sorta. Mostly.

In any case, we've got some more cartoons coming along, two this week in recognition of the lack of an update last week. First we have this "gem":

And then, unto the heels of of the last, we pose the critical question:Wed, June 17 - Delay
Just a quick heads-to-the-air, folks: I'm going to be attending the North Country Fair this weekend, so there'll be no Friday update this week. But fear not! The update to come will feature TWO exciting cartoons, both at once! MiGod!
Fri, June 12 - Regicide
I'm not advocating it, by any means. Not at all. Nobody would be heartless enough to do that. I'm just asking questions. Questions likeFri, June 5 - More
What, you folks desire more? More thoughts, more opinions, more pictures of the world outside to take home and eat on on your own time?

Well, fine. Here's a bunch:
Tomorrowland: Distressingly disappointing, given that it came from Brad Bird, but nonetheless it still contains interesting notions!
Mad Max: Fury Road: Yep, go see it. I got a little bored in the latter quarter, but that's only because it turned the whole story around!
Global Warming: Yep, still a thing, likely will transform our world in the next handful of decades! We can't undo it. We're just gonna have to find a way to live with it find a way to live with it.

Another cartoon? If y'all insist. It's this:Fri, May 29 - Yay!
Hooray, and I say again hoo ray! Stuff is fun. Weather is nice! Life is worth living! Yay, everybody, yay. Welcome to the part of the earth's trip around the sun where everything alive is excited to be so. Spring, it is! Let's spring a bit! Just a bit before maturing to summer, where it's no longer about random sex, it's about contemplative boning.

And in this spirit, I offer another BtAf, a cartoon strip, a series of panels that describes a narrative that play out in the...

Eff it. Stop explaining and start showing. This week's strip isFri, May 22 - Yeesh...
Man, last week's update surrrrrre was drunk. Crazy drunk. Happens sometimes, particularly when you're still reeling from the effects of your sister being elected premier of Alberta, but still. Bad form.

I'm still slowly getting used to the idea of a Rachel Notley Alberta, but hey, in the meantime, Maclean's magazine interviewed me for an article this week. That's kinda neat!

How about a cartoon? How about this cartoon?
Fri, May 15 - More On
I'm still back in Seattle so I don't know how to be a proper excited Alberta New Democratic Pary person. Plus I bailed on all you Albertans after my my sister took on all the work and I just went back to Washinghington.

For now, until there are better, more insistent options, those options will have to take back seats to current Bob the Angr Flower cartoons, as:

Cartoon? Sure, there's one. It'sMon, May 11 - Victoire!
Hey, folks, update's coming in a bit later than I said, but what can you do. How about that election, huh? Who could have possibly thunk that the NDP would form a majority government? Well, a lot of people, I guess, particularly towards the end, but we couldn't really really believe it. And then it went ahead and happened. I'm a bit too drained from my weeklong celebration binge to go into any detail that the avalanche of articles, news reports, tweets and facebook posts might have missed, but the basics and essence of what all went down is probably best consumed here in this great summary in Vice magazine.
Woo!

Cartoon? Sure, there's one. It'sSun, May 3 - Mini-Update
Just a quick note here, folks, saying that I'll be electioning and recovering in Edmonton this week, so the next update will have to wait until I get back on Saturday. Woo-hoo! Vote! Go Rachel go!
Fri, May 1 - Volatile
Whoof! So much so quickly and so soon. Not only does the new Ultron movie come out today, a happening towards which I have dedicated most of my waking thoughts for the last six months, but also --also!-- there's a friggin' provincial election in Alberta, Canada going on right now. Longtime readers may be aware that, though I currently live in Seattle, I hail from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. So an election is a big deal.

Making the big deal even bigger and dealier are a couple of additional factors. One, there's a chance that the Progressive Conservative party, the party that has been governing since 1971, might fall and be replaced by a new government. Two, there's a chance --unthinkable up until maybe a week and a half ago-- that the New Democratic Party, our lefty-liberal Canadian political party, might just win. Three, and this is where it gets personal, my sister happens to be leader of the NDP. It's her awesomeness that has largely contributed to the possible ascendancy of the NDP, and if the impossible happens and the NDP actually wins, she would become premier.

Heady stuff, as I'm sure you can imagine, and it's got my head a-brewin' and a-stewin'. I'll be heading north to Edmonton this weekend to do some last-minute phone-calling and vote-pulling, and then I'll be there gnawing my fingernails off Tuesday night along with hundreds if not thousands of volunteers as we watch the results come in.

So! Plenty! And in the spirit of democracy and public participation in governance and marking little marks on little scraps of paper, I offer the following:

Fri, Apr 24 - Nigh Ultron
Oh man oh man, I am really getting excited about the ol' Ultron. It's already out in other parts of the world and folks seem to be digging it. This is the most desperate time, when reviews will start popping up and particular details will emerge into my range of perception that I'd rather not know. I'm not one to get too incensed about spoilers, but I think my tread will take on a more cautious cadence in this last remaining week before the show, just to be safe.

Let's post a cartoon! Sure! Why not! This is both the time and place, so let's do this thing.
Fri, Apr 17 - MORE!
Whoa, how, hey, howdy, how are all you folks and readers feeling about the oncoming spring? You know the classic tells of spring, the way spring just can't help but reveal itself: longer days, warmer weathers, bluer skies, much less snow and all those annoying plants sprouting and creating leaves and acting like it's time to wake up and begin a year's work again. ASSHOLES! I hope and trust you're all hating this lamentable process as much as I am. Because, make no mistake, I hate it. It forces change and makes one have to reconsider things. UGH! STUPID ORBITS!

Ahem. I'm not really against spring, either as the concept or the season, but one has to put up appearances if one's running a web site about an angry flower. It's expected. By whom? Shush, now.

At any rate, or at least the current rate, let's us all sit back, crack a beer or gin or some form of liquid refreshment and consider the followingSat, Apr 11 - Ack!
Sorry, everybody, I totally forgot to update the site yesterday. The silly thing is there's no particular reason, either; I just came home and puttered around and went to bed and forgot and dcidn't rememember until I ended up at work the next day. Oof! Well, here's the cartoon:Fri, Apr 3 - Hi, folks!
Hi, folks! How's your Friday? Good? That's great. I hope you all got through April Fool's Dasy without serous injury or --God help us-- loss of life. I know it can be dangerous out there with all those amateur comedians trying to be funny, but I think we were able to avoid the worst of it this year, and for that I'm grateful.

Man, I know I shouldn't be this excited, but I am. Why? One simp0lre reason: the new Avengers movie is les than a month away. I'm not gonna lie, folks; I cannot friggin' wait for this movie. I know, I know, this is hardly a minority opinion or super edgy, but it's pointless to deny it. I a super down with these Marvel movies and I think this new one is gonna be great. There. I said it. And I'm not taking it back, either.

A cartoon? Sure, why not? I've got one right here...Fri, Mar 27 - Ee See See See
Hey, folks, guess what's going on in Seattle this weekend! Stop guessing; I'm going to tell you. It's the Emerald City Comic-Con, otherwise known lovingly as ECCC! Nope, I won't have a table there this year. Yes, I know it's dumb not to, but I just want to actually attend a con without having to work it. HOwever! Many of my supremely talented PopCap colleagues will be there, hawking wares not only individual but collective, the latter being the latest edition of the Monsterpedia, a delightful anthology of spooky, silly, terrifying and puzzling monster stories. So, you know, you folks who happen to be attending the con, you should swing by their area and grab a copy! You'll be glad you did.

In other news, a cartoon:Fri, Mar 20 - Yahoo!
Hey, folks! There's been a whole lot of whiny, self-pitying drivel on this sie lately, particularly last week, and I think it's kinda gone out of style. So no more of that for a while, I think, no matter how drunk and maudlin I may sometimes feel. Besides, this week's comic's a corker, the all-consumingFri, Mar 13 -
Late March, Early April
Oh dammit oh dammit, why (how!) shall I just keep getting drunker and drunker, and making cartoons and cartoons again and again, like they didn't even make a thing? Shall I pop up another cartoon for y'all, another one, a weak, barely-breathing extension of myself, some amused trifle that could get me off the hook on Sunday (Cartoon Drawing Day!) as fast as possible?

It seems that I shall. Readers, folks, constant readers, I have been giving you less and less every single day. In the updates, less, and the cartoons, so sadly less.

And yet, I will say that I've been at the very least reliable. Essentially every Friday there's always been another Bob comic, for years and years. Have they meant anything? Perhaps once they did, now they don't, but they still keep appearing. Like, for example, this exemplary example of cartoon art, which presses all the right buttons and speaks to all the necessary truths:

Fri, Mar 6 - Xoamind
Xoamind
Fri, Feb 27, 2015 - Carnivore Us
I'm pretty convinced that, if humanity survives the next handful of castrophes and goes out into the stars to create a trillion-year legacy, we're gonna look back at right now (if we have anything even sideways resembling records of this period), and swiftly conclude that we are all irredeemable assholes for eating meat.

Don't get me wrong; I love eating meat. I do it all the time. But if there is any afterlife justice to be found in this universe, by creator-god or mass-consensus or thing we are as unable to conceive as a bacteria is unable to appreciate a pencil, the thing we have yet to create in this universe, that God we want and expect made eveything and if he or she or it or they do't exist we'll damn well create her/him/them/it, that thing or it or us will look back at us and judge us guilty.

No excuse. True, you didn't think you were doing anything wrong. But your meat-eating pleasure was built on the terror and murder of countless thousands of pain-knowing beings. So let's have a few rounds of life as those beings, and we'll consider your application again.

Yikes. Not lookin' forward to it. But in the meantime, here areFri, Feb 20 - Sniff
Gonna be a brief update this week, folks, as I'm battling a debilitating cold, so I'm gonna get this done, chow some soup and go to bed. But first: this cartoon!Fri, Feb 13 - Normally
In this world there are a few things I really enjoy. I just dig them, they give me happiness, and if they are ever damaged or disrespected, problems ensue. That's kind of where I'm coming from as I present to you generous readers this week's strip,

Fri, Feb 6 - Ooper Bowl
I'd never claim to be a football fan, or that particular brand of same known as a Seattle Seahawks fan, but I watched the game. And as games go, I gotta say that game gave good game. Much as I would've preferred another outcome, the mere fact that we went from one unbelieveable "What just happened?" moment of amazed joy directly to another "What just happened?" moment of stunned disappointment is proof enough for me that the sports, they can be pretty entertaining at times.

None of this, of course, has the slighted bearing on this week's stripFri, Jan 30 - From the Heart
I've written a lot of cartoons over the years, tackled many subjects big ans small. I've addressed issues of the heart, notions of the brain, and qualities of the universe. But never --and I do mean never-- before have I had the moral courage to go after the subject of this week's strip. Until now. Until today. At long last it has come to this. We are here, and we must face Fri, Jan 23 - That Poor, Poor Guy
I just feel bad for him, the dude in this week's strip. He's just so helpless, just has no defences, no understanding of what's about to happen. It' wasn't his fault; it could have been anybody. But this week it was him. I dunno; maybe I'm too close to the situation. I'll let you folks decide as you unravelJan 15 - Fr-fr-fr-FRI-DAY

Why hello readers, do you still exist? I must admit I'm shocked. I've been obvious about just how little I have cared about stuff, politics, the power of econonmies and many diffirent things. All of you who still read this ridiculous blog, you who check in on your own account on Fridays, without machinery feeding you everything you've always wanted: welcome back!

This week's cartoon is a simple exercise in me trying to not spend all my gettting-to-sleep sleeping moments thinking about Ultron. It is called
Sooooooooo, yes, I'm pretty much holding down my life in hopes I'm still alive 3 and one 1/2 months until May 1, when Marvel's Avenger's Age of Ultron appears in theaters. I want that movie so bad. I want it to be mean and angry, to have jokes like the last one, but for it to be ugly and helpless and about how Avengers can't avenge. I'm even willing for it to be one of those goddamn stories in which super-heroes spend the whole time doing nothing else but clean up the messes they themselves create (the very worst motherfukking superhero stories that have ever been written).

Like, as though, it's as if superheroes were super great at stopping bank robberies or back-alley muggings, problems they could punch in the face. As though Crrime was the only social ill that needed powerful people to address. Crime, it turns out, is a great social ill for superheroes because it's punchable.

Poverty? Disease? Hunger? Injustice?

Less punchable by dudes or gals in leather or spangly-colored outfits. Far more difficult to find answers. But problems just the same, and I do love those Avengers. And I have no choice but wonder about the robots that hate them. Thus, please read

(the same comic linked above!)
Fri, Jan 9 - Happy New Year!
Well, I don't know if it's all that happy or not. Kind of too early to tell, really. But we might as well shuffle on and see how it goes, right? Sure! So, let's start things off correctly with a couple of cartoons!

First we have

swiftly followed by

Enjoy!
Fri, Dec 19 - Peace!
Hey, folks, it's that time of the year again, that time when I head back to Edmonton for Christmas, that time when, because I'm stupid, I'm not able to do site updates until my return. So, here it is: the last angryflower.com update of 2014! WOOOOOO *cough cough*.

But fear not, dear readers. I know it's cold out there, cold and dark, so for this last update, I give you not one but TWO cartoons! Okay, admittedly, one of them maybe isn't all the great or "funny," but I heard somewhere it's the thought that counts and I'm sticking to it. So, here's one:
and right behind it, here's the other:
See y'all next yar!Fri, Dec 12 - Not a Planet!
Gonna be a pretty quick update this week, as I've got a lot of Blu-Ray special features to get through tonight before I go to bed. Still, seeing as how the New Horizons probe just woke up and is closing in on Pluto, it's time cast our attention to way beyond Neptune to think about

(Charon is Pluto's moon, incidentally).
Fri, Dec 5 - Dekimal
Why Dekimal, for this week's update title? Well, because I wanted to invoke all three of December, deca (a metric prefix), and deka (possibly also a metric prefix, or maybe just a different way of spelling December).

Whoof, it's been a bit of busy year, hasn't it? It has been been for me, and I've been lucky enough to have spent it doing labor for which I was well paid. How about the rest of you folks? The same? Lots of work, maybe being paid appropriately for it? I surely hope so.

Work work work, lots of it and more down the pipe. Do we get a chance to look outside? I know many friends who've bailed and traveled, others who've bailed and struggled, others still who never bailed and are still struggling. BALLS!

Luckily, the world delivers many things about which to get upset. And thank goodgriefness it does, cuz if it didn't we'd have nothing to do but stay in our pods and deliver wealth to the owners. I certainly know I do. But Bob has a different point of view on the whole nonsense, so my job this particular week is to simply relate to all of you all

Fri, Nov 28 - Black Friday
So I guess here in America it's tradition, after Thanksgiving, to go out an gorge yourself on sales of all sorts. Clothese, electonics, home improvment supplies... all these and more are made available at prices much reduced in celebration of the grand spirit of acquisition and ownership. I hear it's a grand orgy of consumption, but I've never really gotten into it. Odd, really, considering just how much I adore
Fri, Nov 21 - Guestus!
Every so often one or another my friends or siblings suggests a cartoon idea. I pretty much never take them, and they know it, but they still try. And very, very, very rarely, I'll actually take one of those ideas and make it into a strip. This, beloved readers, is one of those times. So, if you enjoy this week's Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, you have one Jody Cloutier of Edmonton, Alberta to thank for it. If you don't enjoy it, well, that's on me. So, without additional ado, here's Fri, Nov 14 - Space-y
Y'know, I hate to say it, but I think I kinda hate Christopher Nolan. I should be all over him, but The Dark Night Rises was stupid, Inception was dull, and Instellar was... well...Fri, Nov 7 - Movember
No, I'm not growing a moustache for Movember. I mean I guess it's for a good cause and all, but I already have a beard, or at least a goatee. Sure, I could shave the bottom part off and leave myself with a moustache, but then I'd just have a moustache, and the point of Movember is that you're supposed to grow one. So I just don't see how that would benefit anybody. That's my position and I'm firm on it.

Anyway, here's a cartoon, both action-packed and mysterious! It's
Fri, Oct 31 - All Hallow's Q
Happy Hallowe'en, folks, people and stalwart steady readers! How are you all enjoying the runup to this year's Hallowe'en celebrations? I'll admit I'm not going all out, nor am I pumping massive amounts of personal energy into a Hallowe'en costume. The limit of my Hallowe'en exertions this year is making sure that the apostrophes get properly placed in each instance between the two Es in "Hallowe'en". That and reminding myself to wear the flower hat to work tomorrow morning.

But this and that and the other things are of little interest to you, my ever-constant readers! The only question teeming in your minds is, "What's the next Bob the Angry Flower cartoon?" So, with little regard to social media, conscience, or how to trend things, and having nothing at all to say about all the allegations flying left and right in Canadaland about possible radio broadcasters, I simply present the following statement. I trust it suffices:Fri, Oct 24 - Sometimes...
Sometimes you just have no choice but to draw a cartoon based on an old TV movie. It's not something that can be debated, or reasoned with, or avoided in any way. In those times, the best thing is just to accept it and go ahead and post the cartoon. This is that cartoon.

Fri, Oct 17 - Doubles!
As promised last week, when circumstances determined that there wouldn't be a new Bob the Angry Flower cartoon way back then, we now put two cartoons together this week, even as while it's done it's now obvious that it shouldn't be done this way, because they sorta mix together without either meaning anything.

Nonetheless, here's the first new strip, from last week, so not that new at all, and it's

Shocking! But it's simply not enough for Bob the Angry Flower cartoon fans, hungry afer a week of no rations, so it is immediately followed by this other strip

which is intented to crumble the very fundamentals of our society, insofar as cartoons may!
Fri, Oct 3 - More Years
Now that most of us with important birthdays have gotten them out of the way, it's time to simply consider: what now?

Once the meaningful people have squared away their birthdays between now and the end of the year, it seems trivial and pointless to spend even a second or a handfull of characters talking about how those "people" might feel about the rest of the closing of the year.

So, let's talk about APE! That's the Alternative Press Expo, this very weekend, Saturday and Sunday, Oct 4-5, at the Fort Mason Center in we-hope-and-pray sunny San Francisco, a white box filled with alt cartoonists, end to end! We used to hang out and do our annual thing in the Mission District in an old train station. I'm told they're tearing that old train station down, so all us alternative press expositors gotta relocate back to where we were fifteen some years ago, the aforementioned white box right next to water and a bunch of sea lions!

Do come out this weekend to check out all the wonderful comicry going on! Do, do! And then be present twice as hard for SatireFest, where enormous political cartooning action will be abundant!

Halfweek
I'll be down in San Francisco for the next week and a half, and that means I won't be around to update next Friday. So sorry, readers, you get a cartoon this week and none the next week. Is it faint consolation to know that you'll get two cartoons the week after next? I will leave it to your hearts to decide. Right now, though, there's an immediacy, a drawn tale of humor and stuffness, and it's called

Fri, Sep 26 - Well then what now
Ah, yes. Another week of time has rolled around and delivered a need to post another new update.

It's both odd and curious how one can spend four out of the last six days in nothing other than a drunken slow collapse. One would think that the collapse would, at some point, finish collapsing. But it turns out, when one's talking about drinking and birthdays and again another night's worth of wine and gins, that there's no bottom. Or at least not yet. It just keeps happening, like those black holes we've recently been given reasons to believe do not exist in our physical universe.

Regardless, in spite of all these nonsensibilities, we have this week a new Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, inscribed in pencil and ink in the following manner:

Fri, Sep 19 - Virgo!
Yeah, my birthday's coming up. I'll be a crisp and flabby 44 next Monday. I used to take a lot of pride and satisfaction from sharing a birthday with both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins (in the uncorrected calendar, of course); now I'm nsot so sure if I should. I mean, having the same birthday as a pair of fictional characters? What could that possibly have to do, good or bad, with me? And then I remember: Hobbits. They're hobbits. And then all is reborn anew!

Anyway, that has precisely zero to do with this week's strip, a unusually silly bit of trifle called

Fri, Sep 12 - Late!
Oof, last night I was so busy not getting hammered (for a change), that I totally forgot it was Thursday and that Thursday is site-updating day. And now it's Friday and I'm late for work! So, quickly then, here's this week's strip!

Fri, Sep 5 - Haaaaaawks!
I'm told there was a football game going on here in my city of residence (Seattle!). Well, not told, per se, but certainly informed through every form of computer-asssited commmunication I use. I even put aside for a while my hard-won sports-hating nerd cred long enough to actually not only watch but become invested in the game itself. And Seattle won! WOOOOO!!!! Sports are great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In other news, a Bob the Angry Flower cartoon makes an appearance right here, right now! It'sFri, Aug 29 - Newtoon!
Hey, folks, who likes new cartoons? You? You? Really, even YOU? Whoa, didn't expect that one, but okay. I have wonderful news for all of you, and it comes in the form of a new cartoon featuring drawings and, yes, words, several of them! It's a blast of a celebration of a party all at once!Fri, Aug 22 - Tmatk Goodness
I think we can all agree that the Mant experience, while fruitful for two or three of us, at some point needed to come to an end.

Luckily, there's a cartoon this week that promises with all sincerity that Mant is done. It is this.

Fri, Aug 15 - Grayening
Not too much, just saying that all the lovely weather we've been enjoying here in Seattle has been grayening, which I mean to say, becoming more gray or grayer. But what could that possibly mean to readers not in Seattle?

Nothing, clearly. The only thing that could possibly mean anything to all of us and all of us Mants is the next current instalment of some sort of Mant story, in this instance it being called
Aug 8 - diving from summer
Yep, it's getting up to the first week, closely collowed by the second week, of August, and all you folks who read this cartoon here at angryflower.com know what that means: a blithering nonsensical post about the passing of time!

I'll keep this one short, as I have kept all the recent updates short for reasons of drunkenness, stupidity or outright lies. I'm still gathering strength from my return from the GWMF, which was so powerful I feel enervated after, and in addition I'm collecting many thoughts in the wake of my recent receivement of an actual for real American Green Card. After nine years of life in the United States, I think I'm prepared to be a permanent resident. Time will surely tell!

So what's on offer this week? Oh, only the striking, startling new edition of Mant, to wit
Yep, Mant's still in the hopper. What could ever click click click become of him?
Wed, Jul 30 - Con Returned
Whew! Comic-Con was a lot of fun! I'll admit, I was doing a lot of complaining about having to get ready for it, but it was worth it. Got to hang out with Keith and Lonnie and Miriam and others, met up with Dan Harmon, attended a fun Adult Swim party, sang "Oh Fionna" to its writer Rebecca Sugar, got and loved the first two JediAcademy books by Jeffrey Brown, got and loved Heck by Zander Cannon, and just basically hung out and drank a lot and made people smile every now and again. As I said: Fun!

And now this weekend is the sure-to-be-great Golden West Music Fest, which means it's time to do an early update, and as promised this one comes with TWO whole cartoons! Well, techinically two whole cartoons, though admittedly one is pretty brisk. Here it is:

Okay, that one's a bit enigmatic, I'll admit. But check out the awesome seriousness of its sequel!

What the hell? What is all this Mant business about? I can't say I'm absolutely sure myself, but sometimes you just have to let the creative process play itself out and see where you end up. I guarantee a shocking twist next week!
Wed, July 23 - Comics & Cons!
It has become that time of year again! What time? Taco Time? Adventure Time? Space Time? No, friends, no. It's San Diego Comic-Con time! And as you, my loyal readers well know, that means I'll be once again hawking my wares at the big show, flower-hatted up like all get-out, standing behind my table in the Small Press Area, K16 alongside the likes of Keith Knight, Lonnie Milsap, the inestimable Miriam Libicki and of course many others, handing out flyers and enticing unsuspecting passersby into entering the strange and yet occasionally rewarding world of Bob the Angry Flower. If you happen to be in San Diego this week, and additionally happen to be going to the Big Show, stop on by and say "Hi"! You know... for kids!

The Bad News
Because it's so early in the week and I'm heading out to the Con, I'm holding out on posting a new strip this week. The horror!

The Good News
On my return from the Con and before my almost immediate departure north for the Golden West Music Fest, I'll post two --count 'em-- two cartoons this time next week! Trust me, it's better this way.

Mant lives! He hungers!Jul 18 - Series New Exciting
Truly it is and it begins here now withFri, July 11 - Hey Guys
have you heard about

yet?
Fri, July 4 - Aw, C'Mon
Yeah, I know American readers are busy boozing and fireworking and filling themselves with patriotic pride. Hey, if it was my nation's brithday, I'd be doing the same. Indeed, I did so three days ago. But that was then and this is Friday, and Friday is when new Bob the Angry Flower cartoons arrive, and so so here is one.Fri, Jun 27 - summertimes
I hope y'all enjoying the newly minted days of summer, brought fresh from the universe to all of us this Friday. This particular Friday, if you know what I mean.

Whether you do or you don't, it makes no difference in your potential reading of this week's cartoon, lovingly namedWed, Jun 18 - North Country Fair
Yep, North Country Fair, or "NCF" as it's not-so-affectionately known, that's where I'm going this weekend, and that's why this week's update is happening a bit early. Like so!
Fri, Jun 13 - I Seriously Wish
I had a recorder attached to my brain, because it is enormously frustrating to have a bunch of well-conceived ideas constructed into sentences, only to have them all whisper away into the night when I sit down to type out this week's update. Stupid brain! Damned gin!

In any case, here's this week's cartoonFri, Jun 6 - HI!!!
Hi, folks! I trust you've all been enjoying the longer and ever longer days, even as the melancholy whiffs set in about how it's only a week or two before the days start getting shorter again. How are you all doing? Are you, as they say, "feeling it!"? I genuinely hope so, because -- let us not be mistaken -- I hope that Bob the Angry Flower readers are discriminating sorts, attuned to meaning and seasons and the occasional laugh delivered in cartoon form. Is such a laugh available this week? Tough to say. This strip is far less funny than last week's strip, but I chuckled a couple of times while drawing it. Funny? I'll leave it to you all to decide as you investigate the ridiculous intracacies of the

Fri, May 30 - Let's Get to It
And by getting to it, I mean only in the most strictly confined confines, which is to say the delivery of this week's pie-encumbered cartoonFri, May 23 - Sightblind
I guess I've been doing cartoon riffs off of books for a bit. Last week's Associated Playground was a quick n' dirtfilled response to Michael Lewis's Flash Boys, and this week, well, I wrapped up Blindsight by Peter Watts, and that's why today you all have inflicted on you this piece:

Mon, May 12 - Insanearly
Hey, folks, you may notice that this post is, as it sort of states in the title, insanely early. Typically such an update would appear on a Friday, and yet here it is, a mere Monday, and the update makes its appearance all brash and tartlike, without the slightest sense of decency or common morality. Well, the simple truth is I'm going to be down in San Francisco all week for some super hush-hush top secret PopCap stuff, so I won't be around Thursday night to do the update. And, rather than put you readers through even a single day of wondering why yet again the update is late, I thought I'd feed it to y'all extra early as a sign of gratitude that any of you readers even still exist. So, with that, allow me to present this week's Bob the Angry Flower cartoon,

Parker in the Front, Party in the Back
I'm not interested enough in the movie to do a full review or anything, but yeesh, Amazing Spider-Man 2. How do you do Spider-Man as a fun-loving quick-witted joker
and Peter Parker as a mumbling emo douchebag?
Seriously, Hollywood; they're the same guy.
He's just wearing a mask!
Fri, May 9 - Quickie
Gonna be a slender update this week folks, since I've got a rockin' concert of video game music to attend. Music isn't going to listen to itself, you know! So, here's the strip.Fri, May 2 - Savior of the Universe
Just got back from Flash Gordon at the Seattle Cinerama, the inagural film in their classic sci-fi May series. I first saw the movie when it came out. I realize now that, as a 10-year-old, my sensitivity to aesthetic we know as "camp" was, to say the least, primitive. All I knew was that I'd seen Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back and that Flash Gordon was much, muich worse than those movies. On the other hand, though, I think we can all agree that the appeal of the Stump Monster is timeless and absolute.

Anyway, on a completely unrelated note, here's this week's cartoon.Fri, Apr 25 - Well...
Not sure how I feel about the strip this week. Like so many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's possible I may have been under the influence of an alien philosophy or a television program with a lot of production value. As I say, not sure. Let's see what y'all think!
Fri, Apr 18 -
yep
Sorry, y'all, you loyal readers, you folks, for continuing to fail to give anything amusing to you other than a dumb cartoon every Friday. For example:Fri, April 11 - Nice Days!
They may not happen all the time, but jeez, they sure are welcome when they do.
If you happen to be in Seattle then you know what I'm talking about. All the rest of you will have to take my word for it, but trust me, nice days are the BOMB. Seriously, it was so nice out, it made me wanna get down on my knees and thank the gods for making me a smoker and giving me an excuse to pop out and enjoy the sun every hour. It's a treat!

Anyway, in unrelated news, here's a cartoon. It's called

Beacon!
Hey, folks, check it out. I just joined with three other extremely opinionated cartoonists--Ted Rall (LA Times), Scott Stantis (Chicago Tribune), and Stephanie McMillan (Minimum Security) in a joint project called "Four Cartoonists of the Apocalypse"! You can see an introductory video and text about it here:
www.beaconreader.com/projects/the-four-cartoonists-of-the-apocalypse.

It's going to be accessible at the Beacon Reader, which offers reader-funded journalism. If you support our work on Beacon for $5 a month, you get access to everything we do, PLUS great journalism by all the other Beacon contributors. Not only that, you'll get cartoons and essays written exclusively for Beacon that won't run anywhere else.

I know, it's a little bizarre for me to be pitching a subscription service from my own site, which is free. But I'm intrigued by this project, I like the folks involved and I want to give it a try. The four of us disagree (vehemently!) on a lot of things, but we all believe that cartoons can and should be dangerous, challenging and thought-provoking. This makes it hard to get support from some mainstream corporate media outlets. Also, the great print media meltdown has slashed salaries and fees for cartoonists. But political cartoons can survive, and thrive, thanks to their readers.

The good news about the role of the Internet in journalism is that it makes you, the individual, the editor and publisher. If stuff is important to you, you can fund it directly.
You'll see cartoons and writing in various formats -- editorial cartoons, comic strips, comics journalism, graphic novels, essays, columns. Offerings also include debates and discussions between us, as well as books, t-shirts and more.

I know, I know. It sounds crazy, like straightjacket, no-unauthorized-visits-even-from-family nuts. But it's so crazy, perhaps it might work! If you're curious, check out the introduction to the "Four Cartoonists of the Apocalypse" on Beacon,
www.beaconreader.com/projects/the-four-cartoonists-of-the-apocalypse,
and please consider trying it out.
Fri, April 4 - Nobody's Fool
I believe we can all agree we're well past the scabrous April fools day where we're forced to endure "jokes" from people who only get a chance to try to be funny once a year.

Meanwhile, the professional funny people continue to poop out such crap as
Fri, Mar 28 - Convening in Seattle
Hey, folks, this weekend in Seattle is the Emerald City Comic-Con, or ECCC for just-barely shorter. I'm not tabling this year, so, uh.... sorry, Seattleites who might have wished to buy some stuff from me. Not this year. But there will be loads of stuff to get, not least the wondrous Monsterpedia 3, done by so very many talented colleagues and former colleagues at PopCap, findable at booth 1308 at the aforementioned ECCC. And of course, being a comic convention, in addition to all the wonderful examples of graphical narrative that will be on offer, there will be much and extended consumption of
which I'm sure we all agree is great for everyone. Have a fun and sun-dappled weekend, y'all!
Fri, Mar 21 - Friday!
Yep, it's another Friday, folks, and you know what that means. It means a brand new Bob the Angry Flower comic! Surely I have one, right? Yes, I do! It's... hmmm... what was it called again? Oh, yeah,

New Archivey!
At last it is here: the time where I announce the new stuff I've been burbling about for the last couple of weeks. It's a new archive!
What's new about it? To the eye, absolutely nothing. It looks exactly the same. But now, when you click on the links, they'll take you to simple but functional comic pages which have such modern 2003 innovations as "Next" and "Previous" buttons. O Brave New World, that it has such wonders in it! There's even a "Random" button so you can bounce around the Bob the Angry Flower archive for all eternity if you want. It's great! Why not check it out?
Fri, Mar 14 - Whoops!
Sorry, folks, I'm a bit late in the update this morning... we had some distressing news yesterday at PopCap about layofffs, so there's been a fair amount of drinking. Regardless, here's a cartoon; it's called

New Stuff?
Not quite ready, but very close. I realize I was probably overstating its importance last week; it won'treally change everything. Still, it's a definite improvement. You'll see soon enough.
Fri, Mar 7- Robo- and other cops
Hey, have any of you dear readers seen the new Robocop movie? I've heard from a lot of people that it's really good -- better, in many ways, than the original! In tribute, then, I offer

Stuff afoot
I don't want to make any announcements until it's all ready to go, but I'll throw out a tease that one of the greatest people I've met in America has done me, you and this site an enormous service pending shortly. Maybe I'm overstating it, but... no, it's pretty good. Gentle readers, please harass me to implement this wonderful new thing!
Fri, Feb 28 - A Brand New Cartoon!
Here's a brand new cartoon! It's calledFri, Feb 21 - Flu Boy
Hey, folks. I'm feeling' kinda flu-y, so I'm afraid I'm not up to writing a gigantic update for y'all this week. However, I intend to mitigate this tragedy slightly by offering not one but two instances of cartoon gaggery. The first features the return of unbeloved gag character Escherichia Coli, Specimen B as he confidently takes on the burdens and responsibilities of our

And the second cartoon is a fill-in strip for good ol' Keith Knight of The K Chronicles, who is helping his dear wife recover from a bout of pneumonia. So, in the style of the Keith Knight, here's

Fri, Feb... Jesus, really... 14?
Valentine's Day?
Happy Valentine's Day, y'all! Here's a cartoon aboutFri, Feb 7 - Let Go My Lego
Folks, readers and additional beings, I don't know how you are all reeling into this new weekend. Were you watching Seattle invert itself on the streets in love and belief for the Seahawk's lopsided win? Did you observe it through Facebook? Did you have a completely different news feed in which our civic barfing and assemblage played no part?

I ask these questions as though I expected answers. But of course there can not and will not be those, cuz I'm typing away at Dreamweaver's code display with no other applications open. My aged computertron sighs and shudders every time I ask it to do more.

Where am I going with this? Anywhere? Nowhere? Was there any kind of...

Ah, yes! The title of this post, "Let Go My Lego." I am unthinkably ready to see the new Lego movie. I feel that it will speak directly to me on so many levels it will take weeks and weeks of me yapping at people about how great it is, if only to work out for myself how great I think it is. Why do I think it's going to be so great? Because it's by the dudes who made Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, an artwork that struck to my soul when I first saw it to the point that I can't really talk about caring about things in any context without bringing CWACM up again and again. I'm mechanical that way.

And since those geniuses, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, made Cloudy so profoudly to me, I'm now trembling at the prospect of their sensibilities being turned towards Lego, the toys, and the making of movies thereof. I await their understanding like a newborn babe.

So, I'm looking forward to the Lego Movie!

Beyond that, I have my own meager creation to present, a creation about creation. It's diagrammatic and insanely self-indulgent and it's simply
about

Fri, Jan 31 - Super the Bowls
I'm typically among the first to jump on the "I don't give a shit about football or sports in general" anti-bandwagon. I mean, what's the point of not being interested in something a lot of the people around you like and enjoy if you don't take the opportunity to sneer and establish how superior you are to them? So, typically, I wouldn't be much interested in the Super Bowl. But, well, I've come to understand it's something of a big deal here in America, and this year ye olde Seattle has its team in the game so it's pretty much the thing this weekend. Even if you're not watching the game, whatever you do will be in some sense a specific act of not-game-watching. So I kinda want to, even if for no other reason that it's a chance to get roaring plastered.

But what about cartoons? Isn't Sunday drawing day? If I get super pished watching the game, how the hell am I going to draw a strip? It's hopeless! Or... it is not hopeless? What if I got a cartoon ready ahead of time? What if, as of this writing, I had already done so? Why, then, the possibilities would blossom like a megafractal bomb wrapped in posies.

The following cartoon is not that cartoon. It is an earlier cartoon, drawn further in the past. But despite it playing no role in whether I'm able to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday or not, it still adresses a key fact of great importance and moment. After all, we're all affected if

Fri, Jan 24 - Another
Quite indeed another day, all us living beings! We get to be alive and see all this crazy poop play out! Better yet, we get to be a part of it, spitting out actions and feelings and stuff and loads and loads of whatnot. Fun! I hope y'all agree!

Thus, the latest cartoon:
Fri, Jan 17 - So Sleepy
Hey, folks! Do you like sleep? Do you? Cuz I'm gonna level with you here: I love sleep. I love it a ton, particularly when I've gone without for any appreciable length of time. So what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna post this update and then I'm gonna crawl in to bed and engage in a lengthy period of voluntary unconsciousness.

But what about the holiday anecdotes and talk of frozen Canada I promised last week? You're in luck, loyal readers. I have packaged such up in a cartoon and now present

Fri, Jan 10 - Back to the Front
Howdy folks, I'd like to spend a lot of time reiterating all the things I've said to my fiends back in Edmonton over my my lovely days there. I'd also like to expend some time writing about the marvelous differences I experience betweeen then and here. However, I've been so busy experiencing those differences -- and processessing them, including tonnes of drinking-- that I find myself here in front of my home computer typing up an update and seeking to smoke bowls and think more on them, and not spend my time running around in endless circles trying to write them down for an update.

Thurs, Dec 19 - Peace and Goodwill
All right, folks, I've got a plane to catch back to Edmonton, which I'm told is ball-freezingly cold at the moment. I'm gonna be gone for a couple of weeks, so this is the last update of the year. But! Since I love you guys all so much, I'll give you this week's cartoon like so:

and then I'm gonna follow that up immediately with next week's cartoon as well, in this fashion:

Wow! Cartoons a poppin'! Have a happy bunch of holidays, folks, and I'll see y'all next year!
Fri, Dec 14 - Er...
...yeah, it seems I plum forgot the update last night. But no fear, gentle readers, cartoon there is, and I shan't dash off to work without delivering it to you all in this manner:Fri, Dec 6 - Peggle 2!
Golly golly golly! After what seems like six eternities but has actually been only two and a half years, Peggle 2 is finally ready to go on sale next Monday! It's been a hell of a ride, some of it bumpy, but durn it if I don't feel some genuine feelings of accomplishment and pride. How about that? Look, there's even a bunch of preview videos! Thus, all you folks who have XBox Ones or will have them by Monday, I recommend you immediately buy our game and play it for entertainment and amusement. It's only $12 and it's actually worth it! Fun abounds!
Next-gen console gaming at its finest! We've got pixels and everything!

In cartoon news, there's a new Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, and it's this:Fri, Nov 29 - Thanks Given
And now that the turkey and stuffing has been consumed and the wine imbibed, all that remains is to present you folks with a cartoon and pass out. So, here's a cartoon! Have a good weekend!Fri, Nov 22 - Pretending
Longtime readers of the Bob the Angry Flower cartoon may recall that every so often this strip veers off into insane musings on highly abstruse concepts of mathematics and physics. This occurs because I have the layman's deadly combination of great interest and utter ignorance. Such is the case with this week's strip,
in which I play with notions in cartoon form because that way I don't have to learn any of the math. Some friends have seen preview versions of this strip, and have assured me that Bob's picture of how this scenario might play out is, let us say, highly unphysical. So, if you get the opportunity, don't do what Bob did in the hopes of repeating his results. They are hogwash.
Fri, Nov 15 - Alumnuses
Sorry, readers, those who might remain, this is yet another drunken truncated weekly update, after having consumed as many gin & sodas as possible in the shortest amount of time among the greatest number of PopCap folk, primarily former, who chose to be at the Belltown Pub this most recent Thursday.

Given my current inability to focus or to expound on anything, I think the safest route at the moment is to drop this week's
cartoon and then bail without taking any questions. Happy Fridays, ladies and gentlemen!

**Addendum**
Let the formerly broken link above be a lesson to all of us --me especially-- on the perils, not just of updating your web site while howlingly drunk, but of the keen and overwhelming of the Quality Assurance phase of any endeavor.
Check your work, folks (and me)! It saves time in the end!
Fri, Nov 8 - Topics
Hmmmm... let's see... No Hallowe'en coming up to babble about and nothing of any particular import having just happened to discuss... I admit I'm at something of a loss to find a topic for this week's update. Surely there must be a point of interest? A day of the week to yimmer on about? A violation of justice or dignity to expound upon? There must be! And yet... No solstice, no equinox, no grand peculiarity of weather... nope. I'm defeated. Beyond noting that I'm cautiously looking forward to this new Thor movie, I have nothing else to say this update, and that's

Fri, Nov 1 - All Hollows' Eve
I spent some time last week bitching and complaining about how nobody could possibly celebrate Hallowe'en on a Thursday night. Now that Hallow's Eve has come around and I'm discovering, to some considerable surprise, that it is possible to celebrate a Thursday Hallowe'en, I'm agahst. With dressups and drinkings galore, even! So, gentle readers, having been swept up in this unintended celebration of other-ness and being-selves that is, fundamentally, what North American Hallowe'en is about, with the attendent drinkings and so-ons, I will get back out on the streets and to it, leaving you, my stalwart Bob fans, with this most simple of cartoons,

Fri, Oct 25 - Hallowah?
Jeez, Hallowe'en on a Thursday. That is the worst possible day Hallowe'en can be on. You can't Hallowe'en after Hallowe'een and nobody goes balls out on a Thursday party, so you've gotta do all you Hallowe'ening the previous weekend. That is to say, this weekend. Robbed of a whole week of prep time! The outrage! It's sufficient to drive an otherwise calm and levelheaded citizen to Fri, Oct 18 - No Fault
Wheeeeee! Look at that! We didn't have the global economy torpedoed by a mindless cabal of one-eyed troglodytes! This time. This calls for a drink! I think I'll have another!

Gravity is so damn good
Just thought I'd throw that out there. I've seen it twice, in 3D but not in IMAX, and I liked it just as much the second time as the first. Everyone --and I mean everyone, even the people who dislike it-- at least agrees that it's a technical triumph, an act of movie magic that recalls those bygone epochs when audiences would gasp and ask How did they do that?
But what I like about it, the thing that blows me away, is how intennsely emotional it is. In terms of its dramatics it's almost unbearably simple, clear and focused like a laser to the point that it's almost not even characters in a story so much it's a visual poem.
On the surface it's about a disaster in space, but more than anything it's about loneliness and disconnection, and its flawless execution of a world without, well, gravity, where things drift without regard to each other, achingly out of reach, left me breathless, my face damp with tears. So, yeah. Go see it. By orders of magnitude the best movie I've seen this year.

APE!
Thanks to all the fans and others who came by the APE table last weekend in San Francisco. Sales were light but acceptable, beef brisket was consumed, charming minicomics were purchased and friends were hung out with. Yay!

Comic!
I have one. It is this.Fri, Oct 11- De to the Fault
Yep, it's some fun now, what with the American experiment careening to an explosively amusing implosion far faster than any of us might have guessed, raised as we've been in a world where the United States reigned supreme for a bunch of generations. Who might have thunk it? Not Obama, that's for sure. Osama might've, and actually published to the effect, but who took that tall skinny beardo seriously on global politics? NOBODY, that is who. And yet here we are facing the

In the meanwhile... Comics!
Do, all you San Franciscans and assorted additonal humans within range, do come check out the Alternative Press Expo, at the San Francisco Concourse Center for the very last time, where actual cartoonists such as as Keith Knight, Shannon Wheeler, and Raina Telgemeier, as well to mention Miriam Libicki, along with me, Stephen Notley, the author of Bob the Angry Flower, will be purveying our wares with such fierceness you might even think cartoons are an actually real art form with creators and artists truly saying stuff with pictures and words! Check that shiat OUT, why don'tcha? It's relatively cheap and it'll get you out of the rain, if there is any! Fri, Oct 4 - Sprint at the Marathon
The remainder of the year, at least for me, is shaping up pretty clear. Do what I can at PopCap to ensure our Peggle 2 game ships as best I can help make it as a debut title on XBoxOne (Xbox1? XBone?). Support my teammates as best I'm able seems to be the answer and to be honest I'm looking forward to it.

Such august company! I must summon additional lifeforce to be excited about comics as well as about Peggle! Tricky, but possible! I promise a new publication at APE. It will inspire awe in all who see it such that the adjective they choose to describe it will be "awesome," meaning at the very least that some awe was involved in the experience.

That typed, here is a Bob the Angry Flower cartoon about

Fri, Sep 27 - Badly Broken
I suppose I'm looking forward to this weekend's Breaking Bad finale as much as anybody, even if I'm now largely convinced it'll be anticlimax with a vengeance.
But I'll admit I'm also heavily distracted byFri, Sep 20 - Five Drive
Gonna be another quick update this week, folks, as I've treated myself to an early birthday present in the form of some sweet and salty Grand Theft Auto V. Thus, my digits tremble in rageaholic anticipation.
Mmmmmm... so many cars! So many cutscenes! So many minigames
and radio stations! I'll be able to, to... to buy suits! And take pictures! And customize hats! Oh, yes, all these and more. It will be... glorious.

So, as I say, a quick strip, another in the burgeoning tale of Harlo and crew. Where this story is going I know not where, but I'm reluctant to let it go for reasons not immediately apparent; maybe I just enjoy drawing these folks. Continuity-deriders, have faith... all this will be over soon enough! But in the meantime, breath deep the mind-moving exhations of theFri, Sep 13 - Quick and to the Point
Hey, all right, how are you folks all doin'? Good, Okay? Don't really wanna talk about it? That's fair. I don't want to waste your time, so I'm just gonna leave this

comic here on this web site and let you go on about your day. Have a good one!
Fri, Sep 6 - Ooh! Ooh!
Ooh! Not to say "Ooh!" too many times, but I'm lined up to get a copy of Visual Studio at work soon! This excites me. What is Visual Studio? Well, as I understand it, Visual Studio is the primary application programmers use to open, edit and save segments of code that drive the workings of, say, programs such as Peggle 2, a game on which I am and have been furiously working.

I'm certainly no programmer (or developer, or engineer, or whatever term is best liked these days by those who make livings wrangling all them crazy functions and classes and sub-classes and memory allotments and driver schedules). But I'm certainly excited about gaining insight into the strange tinkertoy workings of game-making, all those mad dependencies. Not, again, like I'm going to be contributing to those. Most assuredly not. But I will be able to make changes and then construct (or "build") our game on my own computer without having to make changes globally that wreck everything for everybody. I'll be able to ruin things on my own time! YES!

I'm probably getting ahead of myself. No doubt once I get Visual Studio and have the sacred texts opened to me I will find myself utterly bewildered, unable to make sense of the simplest assertion, crying like a newborn to any professional developer within distance to help me understand. Indeed, I look forward to it. Not the crying and the begging for help, but the part where I think I understand something and then learn that I totally don't. And I'm just talking about figuring out how to track stuff through the code; I'm not even thinking about working out all that crazy programming language in which "+" and "++" are HELLA different words, not to mention all the sick sorcery that goes on once you start laying out square brackets [] so and like ][ so for arrays and such. I'm told linear algebra often plays a role in all this.

Given all this excitement, I hope you'll forgive the terrible prophecy, you know, the one, inscribed on the tombs of the ancients, the one that spoke of the

Fri, Aug 30 - Dampy
Golly, it sure rained in Seattle today! This is actually something like news. One hears that Seattle is rainy, but really it's mostly misty. Actual committed raindrops dousing in tandem are rare. But not today! Curtains of downpour rolled in across us from the northeast. Genuine rain. Startling!

Meanwhile, a Bob the Angry Flower cartoon was published on the internet, and it was called Fri, Aug 23 - At the World's End
Enjoyable. The World's End, I mean, the new Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright joint, currently boasting a 93% at Rotten Tomatoes. It ain't that good, but it's good. As a meditation on letting go of the past, the changes wrought by time, and the necesssity to drink heavily and quickly, it's funny as hell. It's also sad as hell at the same time, a trick not many movies can pull off. Whether you cling to the past or march into the future, you're doomed either way, it seems to say. More of a downer than the stoned mastabatory glee of This Is The End, this summer's other apocalypse comedy, but more heartfelt and more capable of swinging from the side for the real laughs. Rough chuckles, at it were.

On a completely different topic, here's a cartoon about

Fri, Aug 16 - Poor Elysium
Man, I wanted to like Elysium so much. And I did like some of it. It looks incredible. The robots and spaceships are impeccable. The stuff in space is glorious. And yet... and yet... it's like Blomkamp knew he wanted to set up a bunch of cool shit, but then forgot he needed to do soemthing with it all.

Take the suit, for example. From the poster and trailers you can see that Matt Damon ends up getting a fancy exo-suit bolted to his skeleton. Cool! I guess he's gonna be some kind of super-powered badass now, with the suit giving him the edge he needs to... to... nope. Not really. The suit doesn't really factor into it. Sure, it plays into the plot with some Johnny Mnemonic-style cybergoofiness, but augmented ass-kicking? Maybe a dribble, but hardly enough to justify making such a big deal about setting it up.

That's just one example. There are others that I'll not get into for consideration of the spoiler-averse, but time after time I kept thinking, V-ger-style: is this... all that there is? Where's the big play? Where's the rebellious rage? Where's the nightmarish catharsis? You're not really gonna end the movie like that, are you? But he did, durn it!

Anyway, all that's neither there nor here, not when there's a fresh Bob the Angry Flower cartoon to present, not when we're all looking forward to a littleFri, Aug 9 - Bam! August!
Hey, folks, how are you digging your August evenings these days? Are they suiting you? Making you feel all right? Enjoying some clement weather now and then? Great! Glad to hear it! It seems like nice days and nights like these are just recompense for strictly adhering to our

GWMF
Man, I don't want to brag or make people feel bad for missing it, but the inaugural Golden West Music Fest last weekend in sunny Ardmore, Alberta was absolutely delightful. The weather? Perfection, golden sun on blue skies dotted with fluffy accomodating clouds drifitng by with needed shade at all the best moments.
The venue? Just right, big enough to feel spacious but small enough to enable two-minute beer runs from stage to camp and back, spacially compressed like unto Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption. The people? The best, friendly, accomodating, committed to partying but adult enough to handle themselves and bring sufficient beer for their own needs plus a bit extra just in case. The music? Played by friends, speaking to our common Albertaness and Edmontonialism, satisfying crowds and unifying all in good good times. Everywhere was ease and contentment, the Canadian ideals of peace, order and good government in soul-soothing abundance. As I've mentioned to folks both there and on my return, I'm not a big believer in Heaven, but if there is such a thing it was there on earth. Well done, all the folks who put it on, and may it rise bigger and better and phoenixy-er again next year!
Thurs, Aug 1 - Golden West
Gonna be a short update this week, dear readers, as I'm packing up to head north for the inaugural Golden West Music Festival, which promises to be utterly the bomb but will require some early up-getting on my part to make the plane.
So! Without scads and loads of additional ado, allow me to present to you, with all gravity, theJul 26 - Almost August
So, hey... you folks have a good time at Comic-Con? Crazy, right? And when you came back and everybody asked how Comic-Con was and you ended up telling the same stories over and over again? Brilliant!

What's that? You didn't go to Comic-Con and you're curious about how Comic-Con was? Well then, a quick summary:

- I didn't see too much of the Con, and only heard second-hand of all the astonishing revelations. There were some good ones, I hear! The name of the new Avengers movie, the Batmanning of the next Superman movie, Galaxy Guardians guarding all over some galaxies, TV shows n such, additional pregnancies and births among cartoonists... news everywhere!

- Mostly I spent time at my table and sold books. By a cursory glance at my records, I sold 101 books. Thanks everybody and anybody who came by and plunked down some dineros for my lafferies. Keeps me going!

- Went to a Kamau Bell standup show. My feet ached and my stomach screamed for filling. Turned out the venue was standing only with cursory bar food. After being shooed away from sitting at two sets of steps I gave in, ordered wings, took my shoes off and flat sat on the floor of the House of Blues eating wings. Not the best frame of mind to see a comedy show but thank Christs, Kamau Bell and his writers are really funny! I gotta figure out a way to check out his show Totally Biased on FX. Comcast isn't helping.

- My one celeb-spot was in the company of one Augie Pagan, celestial artist currently at PopCap Games, drinking in the Room at the Top at the Hyatt. George R. R. Martin was drinking along with some folks the next table over. Golly!

- Hey, how about that Monsters of Alt Comics panel? It was great! Or at least that's how it seemed to me, who'd set to fast drinking whiskey before, during and after the panel. We got the slideshow going thanks to the able skills of Keith's friend Kenny Leung, and then we bibbled and babbled about being 20-year fogeys in the toon biz. We got some laughs, and I think expressed the idea that unrependant individuality, while not neccessary or sufficient for longevity in this "art" thing, certainly was a common element among the four toonists present at the panel.

- Hmmm.. anything else? Ate tapas, drank absinthe, consumed olives, bought random porn (and some not so random... Superman vs. Spider-Man... the XXX version?!?! Fascinating! Though, regrettably, not as interesting as it could've been), endured a nonstop glass-on-glass shriek of "Would you like to get zombified today?" two tables down every 20 seconds for three or four hours every day, slept, bought milk, enjoyed the provided breakfast at the Residence Inn (sausages and bread and coffee and endless little milk cartons!), consumed more olives, drank milk, hummed to myself, packed up and flew home. WOOOOOO! COMIC-KHAAAAAAAANNNNN!!!!

However, that's the past. What of the present, or at least the recent past? Why are you avoiding the question? Could it be that you're

?
Wed, Jul 17 - Monsters of Alt Comics
All right! San Diego Comic-Con starts TODAY. Well, Preview Night, at least. It promises to be a hell of show, better than all the previous Comic-Cons smashed together in a ball! On what do I base this extraordinary claim? Why, merely the fact that, as a result of a last-minute panel cancellation, I will be appearing along with the estimable Keith Knight, the ferocious Ted Rall and the langorous Shannon Wheeler on the fresh minted Monsters of Alt Comics panel, there to make merry and dish on secrets of being a marginal cartoonist for 20+ years. Here's the description:

Monsters of Alt Comics, Saturday 3:30pm Room 5ABJoin Alt-weekly Ink-slingers Keith Knight (the K Chronicles, the Knight Life), Stephen Notley (Bob the Angry Flower), Ted Rall (L.A.Times, MAD), and Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man, the New Yorker) as they celebrate 20+ years of answering why they don't draw comics like Garfield. The four expound on the myriad of ways they've managed to thrive in a profession that has seen many of their peers
throw in the towel.

What fun! I even made a slideshow! So if you get a chance, swing on by and bring a bottle of Jameson. Wild Turkey or Jack Daniels would also work.

Pac Rim!
Yep, it was great. I didn't leave the theatre dripping with my own ejaculate, but I had a thorougly enjoyable time. I liked plenty about it, but I think what I liked most was its sincerity. There's not a cynical frame in the film. You can tell Guillermo Del Toro just aches with love for the world he's put together, the characters he peoples it with, and the testament of hope and optimism it embodies. It just felt good. Morally good. I'm itching to go again, just as soon as I can rustle up some primo IMAX 3D tickets. Hooray for giant robots!

Funnies!
Speaking of hooray, there's little more inspiring (to my mind) than the story of

All right, peace! I'm out! See you at the Con!
Fri, Jul 12 - Oh Man Oh Man
Okay, I don't want to jix this or anything, but I'm starting to get this idea that Pacfic Rim could be realllllllly satisfying. I already know I want to see movie with giant robots beating up giant monsters, so the only real questions are just how much awesome sauce will be on tap and how big a ladle I'll able to weild stuffing in all in my movie-hole. I'm thinking
28 kilograms and 2 metres long, respectively, but that's just an estimate.

Ah, but it's not tomorrow yet (unless it is! oh boy oh boy oh boy!), so I suppose while I wait for time to tick its way over there, I might as well prsent you with all the goings-on as reported diligently by the crack team at

Comic-Conning
So San Diego Comic-Con is coming up with a fierceness. As usual, I'll be there, flower hat akimbo, selling books to anyone who'll stand still. Anybody who wants a slick copy of a fine Bob the Angry Flower book had better go back in time to months ago when the tickets weren't sold out and get one. Pick one up for your buddy, while you're at it; I'm sure he'll appreciate it! It's Nerdvana! Fri, Jul 5 - Latey!
Whoops, hey, whoa, totally forgot it was Friday and the world needed a Bob the Angry Flower web site update. Long weekends, they mess with the head. Plus, lingering effects of Pride Parades can manifest themselves thuslyFri, June 28 - Weakness & Strength
Hey, everybody, welcome back. For all you folks hoping I might have a searing indictment of the new Kal-El movie in cartoon form for y'all this week, sorry to disappoint. Instead we find

Given that, I do still have some thoughts about Man of Steel.
Last week I talked briefly about how I felt the creators of the new movie were honestly trying to find a way to make Superman relevant. They broke him down into his component elements and rebuilt him, and what they ended up rebuilding was an alien demigod discovered among us, along with all the fear and terror that would inspire.

As I said last week, I wasn't satisfied with their results. So I did a bit of my own investigation into Superman's roots by buying The Superman Chronicles, Volume One.
It's DC's collection of all the original Superman stories all packed up, from Action Comics #1 through #13 to Superman #1, spanning from June 1938 to July 1939. I'm not going to get into a big dissertation on how those stories reflected their age and how Superman came to embody so many hopes, dreams and fantasies. I will, however, relate some quick facts about Superman's early adventures thusly:

I haven't read Action Comics #11 yet, but no doubt he'll be fighting uppity civil-rights lawyers to protect the states' ability to limit voting rights, and I'm confident he'll go on to fight namby-pamby liberal faggots to protect the principles of traditional marriage. That's always been Superman's style: standing up for the establishment.

Wed, June 19 - Irly
Irly, as in ahead of time, like this week's update. Normally it's all about Friday; this week it's Wednesday. Sorry to pop the new cartoon on y'all ahead of time, but I'm going camping for a bit and I'll not be around computers. So! Please early enjoy this remarkable cartoon on the subject ofJun 14- Man of Lead
So I saw the new ubermensch movie. I still don't know what to make of it. Some bullet points:

I LIKED
- the air battle was everything I ever wanted to see in Superman 2.
- for the team making this movie, they made the conscious choice to disassociate themselves from all the classic Superman tropes -- the bright colors, the Clark/Superman dichotomy, the Lois/Clark/Superman triangle, the clear unambigous moral sense derived from a salt-of-the-earth American midwest upbringing -- in order to recreate the super-man from the ground up. I applauded their intentions and results when they did it with Batman, and I applaud their intentions with a superman.

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE
- the grey, darkened, leaden visual motif that defines the film; Kryptonian technology is made of lead. All the colors in the movie are leaden. Superman's bright blue and red aspirational colors are dulled blue-and-red-tinged greys. Colors do not and cannot exist in this world.
- Pa Kent's bizarre moral lessons for his son: you must never reveal yourself. Protect yourself at all costs. You may want to help others, and that's good, but you must never do it in a way that compromises your secutiry. Even if that means... especially if that means... watching your father die when you could save him except that might reveal you. Never help someone if it means endangering yourself.
- the odd ways that different Kryptonians dealt with being on Earth, some folding up and whimpering at their new-found x-ray vision, others going straight in and bashing full-bore Superman-style without concern. Maybe it was their Kryptonian battle-armor? Was it some kind of super-man power substitute? Wouldn't that have applied back on Krypton when Jor-El and Zod were fighting? Not sure.
- how the Batman movie had more laughs than the Superman movie.
- the appalling destruction porn, especially given how the Avengers last year, an admitted popcorn fun movie, still took moments to consider the death and loss of such an event and put their heroes to the task of preserving and protecting innocents, while this dark and serious and real-life movie never spared a single second on us even though clearly tens if not hundreds of thousands of people would have been killed by the events of this story.
- the fact that, had I never heard of Superman in my life, this movie would have seemed in its tone and rhythm like a large-scale horror movie, awful and grey and destructive and fearful.
- my unfulfilled wish that Clark or Kal or whoever he was might emerge colorful and alive as Superman, the Man of Steel.

That said, why not go see it? Check it out and decide for yourself! Meanwhile, Bob the Angry Flower concerns himself with

Fri, June 9 - Spoiled!
Golly, there sure was a lot of chatter Monday morning about the Game of Thrones episode the night before. People were all up in that shit. Hey, I was there too; it was a hell of an episode. What I found odd about the discussion that ensued, though, was that the bulk of it seemed to revolve around the morality of hinting at plot details of a recently broadcast episode of a television program, rather than, say, the morality of murdering several dozen people at their wedding. Makes sense, I guess; in our modern world one is more likely to face inadvertent spoiling than apocalyptic oath-breaking.
Still, I was surprised at the butthurt. I mean, this is all based on books, right? The cat's already sorta out of the bag as far as what kinda stuff is gonna happen in the show.

Anyway, that's not why I called you all here today. No, you're here to bear witness to the online publication of a brand new Bob the Angry Flower cartoon called

Fri, May 31 -
Wilful
I'm not entirely sure why I chose "wilful" as the title of this week's update. I typed it out and it seemed right. Perhaps I meant "Wiful" as some kind of improperly spelled retrocausitive callout to a character awaiting in the future, some figure of personhood named Wiful who will manifest him-or-herself in the comic in the weeks to come. I doubt it, though. Much more likely I'm lit up like a Hallowe'en tree festooned with radiant gin & sodas and I'm simply babbling to myself and the dozen handful readers of this gallantly updated website.

Regardless, I hope all you folks out there have enjoyed your most recent week as we skate remorselessly towards the bittersweet summer solstice now less than a month away. Life, I am assured, is for the living, and it is in this generous spirit that I offer you all a Fri, May 23 - Trekkin and More Treks
I don't really want to add to the internet explosion of hate and denigration offered towards the new JJAbrams Star Trek film by those who hate and denigrate it. I must, however, reveal Bob's reaction, which is succinctly expressed in this brand new Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, called Star Trek Fri, May 17 - SpIFFy!
I just got back from the SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) opening gala and I'm rather lit. I'd love to go on and on about the premiere movie, Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, and the ensuing evening, but for now I'll confine my comments to saying that it was a lot of fun.

But immediately time arrives to turn all attention to this week's Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, a cheap, cowardly broadside against someone dear to all of our hearts, and it's called

Oblivion
Saw this on some co-workers' advice and darned if it's not too bad. It's not the most thematically or emotionally
ambitious movie ever, and as a number of reviewers have complained, many of its ideas are first- or second-order derivatives, and maybe it's just that my expectations have been beaten into bloody submission, but it was good to watch a film that didn't blare insulting stupidity in the first ten minutes (I'm glaring at you, Prometheus). If nothing else, its visual aesthetic of magnificent sterility is as meticulously considered as anything in the genre. Watching the movie is like drinking a tall, thin carafe of perfetly distilled water, a refreshing change from most movies where it feels like you're being asked to guzzle half a can of repurposed donkey piss. I hadn't thought much of director Joseph Kosinski after Tron: Legacy, but I'll definitely give him a nod for this one.
Thu, May 9 - Early to Rise
Hey, folks, this week's update title refers doubly
to the fact that it is early by a day and to the fact that the reason it's early is because I'm heading up to springy Edmonton this weekend to attend a raging fundraiser for the nascent Golden West Music Festival, a journey for which I will have to get up early this morning. Hence the double-bladed import of the "early" reference in this week's update title. I hope this paragraph settles and clarifies any lingering confusion regarding this issue.

So, it marching on towards midnight and me hoping to get some solid sleeping in, I'm gonna wrap this baby up with a link to this week's strip, currenlty and forever entitledFri, May 3 - Hickory-Smoked
That's a bit how my apartment smells this evening, happily the only seeming end result of a fire that made the news and had the building surrounded by fire trucks just three hours ago. Seems there was a fire in the trash chute, or the bin underneath it. Smoke billowed from the roof, evidently. Luckily, nobody was hurt and the fire was contained, which to my mind greatly calls for a hearty mug of Fri, Apr 26 - Cowtell
Sorry for the slender cartoooning and ridiculously abbrevieated work on offer this week. I'm moved, but not yet fully moved, and I've had to make the hard corporate Bob the Angry Flower Inc. decisions about where best to put my limnited resources. I never asked for these responsibilities (other than by taking them all on by drawing a cartoon and establishing an internet website where these cartoons would be made available now and forever more), nor have I ever had any sensible idea what I was doing at any stage of this 20-year process of creation, presentation, lamentation and continuation.

All that said and booked, I will confess to some residual curiosity about just what exactly happened this week when

Fri, Apr 19 - Behind
Behind, as in the times, when one is posting a cartoon written, conceived and executed during the halcyon innocence of last week. My, the times, they is a changing!
If only there was a way to travel through or otherwise experience time in a way where we could, if even for a moment, grasp the elegant simplicity of

Fri, Apr 12 - Tiiiii-ming!
Timing! As in, this move has utterly messed up mine, such that I keep blanking on the updates until Friday morning. Here's a cartoon! Laff it up, fuzzballs!Fri, Apr 5 - Going to the Motions
Hey, folks, yet another lightning-short
update for y'all this week. I know, I know, it's been a lamentable trend for some considerable time now. My current excuse is that I'm in the middle of moving, a necessity necessitated by the people who own my building gearing up to demolish it. Finding new digs, separating stuff into piles for retention and ditching, worrying about scheduling haul-aways... it's all been giving me bad cases of the frazzes and the nerves. It's the sort of process that leads to strangely unamusing fantasies such as Fri, Mar 29 - Holy Smickers!
Yikes! Sorry, folks! With all the Thursday nighting I got up to last night, I very nearly slid off to work this morning without having done the most important thing a man can do on a Thursday night: update angryflower.com!
Luckily for all, however, I recalled just in the proverbial nick, and I present this week's strip.

As an added bonus, after the linking/bad html fiasco of last week, I'm going to check, double, check, triple check and quintuple check the link to this week's strip to absolutely ensure that it is, in fact, the link to this week's strip. Service! Fri, Mar 22 - Tempus Adventure
Y'know, there's no experience in this world better than watching 10 episodes of Adventure Time back to back, or if there is, I certainly refuse to consider any evidence for its existence. There's no point in really getting into the details since, as is so frequently the case, I'm the last person in the world to find out about it and you guys already know how math it is. I just wanted to reassure everyone that I too, finallly, have joined you all on board.

In unrelated news, a new Bob the Angry Flower cartoon is available, and it's this one!

VERY ADVANCED UPDATING - correction
I posted the above strip Friday morning, Mar 22. Stupidly, however, I forget to check the link, only to realize the next morning that the aborna.html retained the image from last week's cartoon, Crusty.
Whoops. The link should be fixed now, and I thank all those who wrote in and all those who didn't on noticing that the site was messed up.
Fri, Mar 15 - Ozzum!
I'm gonna babble a bit about the new Oz movie, but before I do, here's a sad comic from last week, to wit:Oz the winderful and wonderful
Studious readers may recall from last week a small post of complaint about the new Oz movie.Well, bite my tongue. This eve on the recommendation of a trusted friend, I went and saw the new Oz. Someone needs to be drowned in monkey feathers, and I suppose that someone is me.

Because! I liked it. My friend Matt Homberg sold it to me last night by expressing surprise that none of the reviews mentioned the overall Sam Raiminess of it. He was angry at how nobody talked about the visual references to Army of Darkness.

I'd feared the film to be a horriffic next step from the abominable Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. I'd feared this because the trailers seemed to promise the same: sensously colorful digital environments surrounding bewildered actors striving separately in green-cloaked empty soundstages serving a shallow story about nothing, not even the images.

Oz: The Great and Wonderful is not that.

Where Burton's Alice in Wonderland was cynical and trivial, Oz is innocent and playful.

In brief, cuz it's late and I shan't spend the time to write a wholly coherent review, here are some points:

Oz's art direction is lively. The computer-generated world in which the movie takes place has amusing and striking elements. It's a green-grassed world, but it's made of loops and graceful arches, little bridges across nothing. It's an up-an-down world rather than a flat studio filled in with digitalis.

The pacing was quick. Matt said it was like Army of Darkness. I've always held Evil Dead 2 much higher than Army of Darkness, but when I saw the movie I understood what he meant. It's snappy, immediate, light on its feet. It's like a well scripted casual video game, making jokes and presenting images and ideas and unironic character moments just as long as it takes for the audience to perceive them and then moving on.

It's utterly silly and completely sentimental. It's got nothing to offer but platitudes but it offers them with an open hand and an open heart.

The actors are all into it and game. Franco mugs and twirls and cracks jokes and acts quick and surprised like Ash. Mila Kunis arrives talking like an L.A. spooked girl dressed like, well, dressed like a woman with a giant floppy hat, a smart red velvet jacket, a silky blouse and a pair of sleek leather pants that reveal quality. Kunis's sister, Rachel Weisz, appears more straightforwardly fantasy-dressed with a sparkling dark gown and flashes of flint in her eyes, while Michelle Williams sports numerous outfits matching her chimeraic roles as yearning farmgirl, monstrous shadow and sternly earnest Glinda (spoilers!).

I contrast O:tGaP to Burton's Alice and Wonderland on many points, but the point I'll bring up this moment is how Alice in Wonderland presented a single girl surrounded by digital environments and digitally distorted co-stars while Oz tells a digitally enhanced, digitally backgrounded story about four human actors (with a couple of CG characters along for the ride).

Plus, as Matt was kind enough to point out, this movie is Sam Raimi all the way, with classic Sam Raimi camera gags, the Sam Raimi we forgot we loved when we were done with Spider-Man 3. There's a freshness. Army of Darkness and Evil Dead 2 references abound.

So, wrapping up and going to bed... Oz the Great and Wonderful is an innocent and playful romp. It's what we're marketed so often and have had so rarely delivered.

I got into it so early in the scenes, I spent no time trying to work out how it related to other Oz works. I liked it as it was. Colorful, simple, unironic and fun. Fri, Mar 8 - Ozzy Oddness
I'm not afraid to admit, I'm terribly confused about this whole Oz the Great and Powerful business. I get that it's a prequel, but is it a prequel to the novel The Wizard of Oz, the movie Wizard of Oz, the novel Wicked or the musical Wicked? Or some combination of all four? And how does Return to Oz fit into all this? I mean, I'm as excited about unnecessary metatextual confusion as anybody, but if I have to actually go see this miserable film to find out the answer I swear to God I'm gonna drown somebody in monkey feathers.

Fri, Feb 15 - Loverlings
St. Valentines was a good day, wasn't it? A great opportunity for those in love or loving systems to confirm and strengthen their loves, and also a great opportunity for those not in love to consider the worths and deficits of their own states in regards to the global love co-ordinate. A wonderful date for all of us as a part of love!

I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about love in this update. I do have a cartoon to deliver. And indeed, as I drunkenly and stonededly type these words, I find myself looking for every angle of escape. A gloriously simple lane presents itself, shining with refusal and unwillingness to talk about anothing other than this new cartoon. It is this current week's cartoon, and it's about drones as we see

featuring Donny the Drone.Fri, Feb 8 - Getting to it
I think, for this update, rather than indulging in a load of witless rumination on this or that aspect of the month of the year or the day of the week or any of the other gosh-this-Tuesday-feels-like-Thursday babbling I tend to favor, I'll cut directly to the chase and post this week's strip thusly:

Bam! Efficiency! I love it!
Fri, Feb 1 - RENTS
Golly, this January went on for some considerable time. I'm not complaining; there are plenty of things I resolved to do this month and didn't, but I'm willing to chalk it all up to extended January hours of sleepiness. Now it's February, this brash new year 2013 elbowing its way itnto our lives, calling and responding from the echoes of our souls saying, "Okay, enough naps. Let's get to it!"
No doubt all you dear readers have its to which you should attend, as do I, and high time insists the time for moving is now. What motion will occur? I don't know about you folks, but I'm curious and intimidated to find out, even if the result is dreary stasis.

That said, as always and every Friday, another Bob the Angry Flower cartoon births itself to everyone everywhere, this particular strip being called

Rocking and also Boxing
It's well past bedtime, but I take this moment to commend the staff and owners of Seattle's Rock Box, a fiendishly great Japan-style karaoke establishment mere blocks from my home. Their setup is among the best I've ever seen, multiple rooms of varying sizes in which one can bellow one's throat to bursting with all the very latest tunes (Book of Mormon and other Trey Parker greats notwithstanding). Their book is excellent, stuffed with musical numbers, and they run drinks to you with a ferocious intensity I would otherwise only associate with Russian Spetznaz officers. Plus, they have a lively and congenial front room karaoke setup, liquor abounding, in which one may sing and linger and encounter quite the charmingest of Seattle folks unified by a mutual need to sing their pulsing, emotion-laden hearts out. Well done, Rock Box! You're an inspiring example of local enterprise!
Fri, Jan 25 - Guns and Whatnot
First the whatnot, in the form of this week's strip, a little pictoral commentary called

It's called "The Golden New Age"
Guns and gun control have been much on people's minds of late. While I haven't done a strip on the topic recently, I have had a few folks write me to ask, "Hey, what was that strip you did where everybody's got nuclear weapons?", presumably noticing that the strip did in fact discuss the issue with typically Bobian obliqueness. So, just to get it out there for folks, the strip is called The Golden New Age. It's in the archive! Fri, Jan 18 - Steely Man
Okay, seriously... can anybody explain to me who's eager for a dark and gritty reboot of Superman? I mean, I suppose on paper it makes sense, people like theChristopher Nolan-esque pseudo-real approach to Batman, so why not give it a whirl with the big S? But Superm,an just doesn't seem like that kind of guy. He's not that kind of legend. I think it might be kind of neat to go back to his earliest roots
when he was a big bright underdog power fantasy who poped gangsters and crooked senators in the jaw
and ripped safe doors off their hinges, but a solemn, psychological exploration of an alien ubermensch seems super wrong-noted to me. And does every superhero have to wear the same weird rubber material for his suit? I dunno, man. I just don't know.

Anyway, in a completely unrelated matter, here's a cartoon.Fri, Jan 11 - The Mizzes
Saw Les Miserables. But first, a cartoon!
I don't actually have too much to say about the ol' Miz. I liked a couple of songs okay, but most of it sounded kinda like treacle. I found myself not giving a flying rat about the pretty-boy who shows up later as Cosette's love interest, and indeed the last hour or so is pretty damn tedious. On the other hand, darn it, I do like me some Anne Hathaway.
Just can't help myself.
Fri, Jan 4, 2013 - Newy!
All right! A new year! Smells good! Lookin' forward to it! Good times! Yeah! Woooo! Let's do this! A cartoon!
Bam! And then... another cartoon!
Life just keeps getting better forever and ever! Testify!
Thur, Dec 20 - Holidays and New Years and Such
Hey, folks, I'm running a tad late on getting out of the house to catch a plane back to Edmonton for the holidays, so this is going to be a quicky update. Here's a cartoon!

There won't be an update next week, as I'll be too busy frolicking in the northern snows and being far away from my computer, but no worry, there'll be cartoons two when I get back on Jan 3. So, all you folks out there, have a roundly satisfying last few days of 2012, and let's pick this up again on the other side! WOOOOOOOOOO!
Fri, Dec 14, UrHobbit
I've seen the film and I'm not yet sure what I have to say about it.
I supppose the easiest and most necessary thing to talk about is the remarkable new formatting by which the fillm is presented. That is, I saw it at 42 frames per second as well as in three dimensions.
What was that like? It was startling and unusual. The film opens quietly, easing viewers into controlled spaces where they may deal with the oddnesses of how they're seeing. It then explodes into all of everything, hitting viewers with a prologue akin to that shown at the beginning of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, a swirling presentation of apocalypctic events to set the story. As a viewer, I observed what was happening even as I dealt with how strange and odd it felt to have these events presented in this way.

Once the prologue is complete, simpler storytelling takes hold. A scene unfolds with characters we know in a time we can place them. It will be up to each and every individual viewer to decide how to or whether to accept the framerate and additional dimensions on their own time. Some may never accept, while others may say "Fuck it!" and shut off the parts of their perceptions that are getting in the way of enjoying a scene in which Martin Freeman as Biblo Baggins becomes increasingly frustrated at more and more uninvited dwarfs arriving at his door.

Does Bilbo's Uninvited Party set the scene? Are we properly introduced to the characters and given reasons to care about everything they do? I invite viewers to decide. For my part, after having been presented with a startling way of seeing cinematic storytelling and given time to absorb and accept that way of seeing, I embarked on Biblo's journey with him.

Once I'd agreed to set out with Bilbo, however, I fear the movie set itself to other problems, such as how to depict a dealing with three trolls, or how to make sure the dwarfs had their bits, or how to present a goblin attack, or how to get us to the elven town of Rivendell, or how to introduce apocryphal story elements described in appendices to the Lord of the Rings, such that over some time I found myself wondering what had become of Bilbo. I'd lost him a bit.

I'll fully admit to being honestly distracted from Bilbo by Radagast's appearance. Yes, I was excited to see Sylvester McCoy, the 7th Doctor, appear in Middle Earth as an addled wizard, and yes, one of my favorite moments from the entire film was hearing Radagast snort with confidence about the ability of the rabbits hauling his rabbit-sledge. Indeed, who the hell to whom am I apologizing? All that shit RULEZ!!!

Indeed, I'll wrap up by concluding that the movie, while starting out in a troubling place for the eyes, brain and mind, gradually builds itself on all points, establishing itself and its storytelling, until as it rolls up to its last few minutes, it's delivering on 46 barrells, thirty-eight of which it promised before even budging from the gate.

All Hail the Hobbit! YEAHHHHHH! Let's do it up next year with DRAGON MEAT!

Given the furry feet...
shall we indulge in another Bob the Angry Flower cartoon? I believe we shall:Fri, Dec 7 - Almost Hobbit
I'm still wrapping my head around the notion that by this time next week, barring death or blindness, I'll have seen The Hobbit.
Longtime readers of angryflower.com may recall that the Lordof theRings films were, to me, a VeryBigDeal. I hungered and fevered and wondered and worried and stabbed anybody who stood between me and seeing the films at the earliest opportunity.

This time around, I'm not so manic. I'm looking forward to it, and I'm grateful to PoCap for having arranged an early screening for us, and I've no doubt there will be much to enjoy. But I'm not crazy for it. At least, not yet.
Still a week to go. Who knows what insanities might emerge as the time approaches?

Comic?
There is one, a rather silly effort entitledFri, Nov 30 -Last Month 2012
Directly stated, it's not properly the last month of this year of our Lords 2012. It's the last day before the last month leading up to the 2013th year as set by our Pope-established calendar. Of course it's a bit of a mess, particularly if you start looking even a little bit into days and calendars and how various establishments like to roll out new calendars the moment they're in charge.

Likewise, it's only a little bit before the Mayan calandar runs out of days and faces its own unique Y2K crisis. It's a bit of a puzzle about how we're still getting upset about calendars created by peoples we've thoroughly wiped out not quite a thousand years ago, but we all know how it is. If anybody said anything with great confidence about our future, we're all obliged to worry.

Putting aside all the fusses, complaints, and fears of the new, please allow me to submit a very few addtional things.

Two
, noted unicornal specialist Bjorn Unicorn of the Peggle Institute has, after a lamentable absence, begun to renew his blogging responsibilities at pegglefever.com. He's always good for a laughable insight, no matter how much his magical duties have fallen across realistic waysides. No doubt he has good explanations for the messes, or perhaps not.

Three
, dear readers, all you folks who still roll by angryflower.com on lazy Fridays to see what's up, there is another cartoon comic strip. Nobody on this Earth will say it is good, nor will anyone say it is current, but I'm confident all will agree that this new strip isThu, Nov 22 -Amerigiving
Hey, folks, just a quick little update this week as I prepare to dash out of America for American Thanksgiving weekend. Stay safe on the roads out there, don't eat too much, and always, always beware of

Fri, Nov 16 - A Galaxy Far Away
With the election over and the mind starved of easy things to think about, I suddenly find Star Wars rushing unbidden back into my thoughts with the Force of a Kashyyykian hurricane. On suggestion of one of my best PopCappian colleagues, I find myself reading the Timothy Zahn novels for the very first time, thrown tumbling and thrawning into a world where the prequels never existed. Super crazy, particularly for a guy who's always considered himself to occupy the cutting edge of Star Wars knowledge. Taking the Timewarp back to Zahn's 1992 is crazily tripping me out. I'm feeling all

Fri, Nov 9 - Relection
How about that election, huh? I've gorged on so much schadenfreude I thnk I'm gonna pop. I may have my problems with Obama on a lot of fronts, but for now I'm just gonna luxuriate in the crestfallen features of America's leading pundits as the realization dawns that no matter how hard they clap their hands and wish, Tinkerbell ain't getting up ever again. Ahhhhhh... so refreshing.

It's curious they haven't yet called Florida with 100% of the vote in, but I presume they're ironing out any last irregularities or dealing with those last few ballots improperly

Good luck for the next four years, folks! Upwards and onwards!
Fri, Nov 2 - Prelection
After what seems like six eternities, this misbegotten 2012 Election year is finally shuddering to its sloppy, amibiguous finish, and I think I'm not alone in saying the whole dreary mess can't be over too soon. I'm tired of polling and worrying and anticipating; let's just do the damn thing. We have other matters to attend to, matters awaiting the decisions ofFri, Oct 26 - Earlowe'en
Yep, another one of those years when Hallowe'en comes at precisely the wrong time, mid-week, such that to celebrate the weekend before seems too early and the weekend after pointless (as it always is) cuz it's already November. This is the first year in my living memory I haven't put together a costume; 2012 keeps coming up with surprises. Luckily there are a few older outfits to be deployed in fresh circumstances, but still, there's no denial: it's a copout.

But what are you going to do? Stuff seems all frightful and fraught these days, and while that's appropriate for the Hallowe'en season, it ain't exactly fun. Fortunately in times of stress and troubles like these, we can and alwys have rely on the labors of theAddendums
In case you're wondering why I'm giving the subject of this week's strip such a hard time when his policies regarding such haven't been newsy of late, I direct you towards Mitt Romney's 5-Point Plan. Note the only mention of "workers" and the proposed defense of same. It's policy, folks!
Fri, Oct 19 - Back from APE
Yep, we went and had ourselves an Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco last weekend. Fun! Even as everybody was paying more attention to the New York ComiCon, a brave selection of indy cartoonists bucked the trends and did APE instead, bless 'em. Thanks to everybody who came by, especially Shannon Wheeler, who helped me get through my 20 Years of Bob the Angry Flower talk with minimal casualties, and Keenahn Yung, longime Facebook liker, who helped the hours disappear by bringing me a bottle of magic elixir (gin!).

Even as we all reeled from Keith Knight's first-ever non-showing at APE,
as compensation the table next to me was occupied by no other than megalegend Sergio Aragones, supreme class act, who even took a few minutes to explain to me how he approaches all those dizzying two-page murals with dozens of characters in 'em. Thanks, Sergio!

Cartoon
Who wants a cartoon? I do! It's kind of Hallowe'en-themed this week, which I know is a bit early, but it's all I got. Please enjoyFri, Oct 11 - EAT!
Quick update this week, folks, just long enough to feast on the sublimnity that occurs when

But that is not all. I, Stephen Notley of Bob the Angry Flower, will also be there, and I'll even be presenting a talk with slides along the following lines:

Sun, Oct 14
11:45 am
20 Years of Bob the Angry Flower
Join preposterous Bob the Angry Flower creator Stephen Notley plus secret guests such as Shannon Wheeler in a rollicking discussion of flower hats, Avengers love, dinosaur insolvency, music in comics and why drawing a flower cartoon for 20 years seemed like a good idea at the time. Karaoke will remain a fierce possibility!

There is a sadness; my longtime con-frere and co-monster of indie comix, Keith Knight, will not be manning the booth next to me. However, the sting of his absence is mitigated by the fact that none other than cartoon megalith and supreme human Sergio Aragones will occupy Keith's usual spot by my side. I just found this out and I'm frankly a-twitter! HOLY MACKERELS AND ASSORTED SMELT! I hope I don't annoy Sergio's pants off, though I also kind of hope I do just for the pants.

So if any of you dear readers happen to be in the area this weekend, do swing by and buy!
Fri, Oct 5 - Headline
And then there was text. And when the text was done, lo, did there appear a clickable header image of the title of a cartoon, like so:

And lo did the cartoon appear, and announce its trivial gag, and disappear again and forever into the ever-churning Internet.

Sun, Oct 14
11:45 am
20 Years of Bob the Angry Flower
Join preposterous Bob the Angry Flower creator Stephen Notley plus secret guests such as Shannon Wheeler in a rollicking discussion of flower hats, Avengers love, dinosaur insolvency, music in comics and why drawing a flower cartoon for 20 years seemed like a good idea at the time. Karaoke will remain a fierce possibility!

Come on by!
Fri, Sep 28 - Oh yeah real it up
I hope we're all enjoying the plunge, by which I mean how we in the northern hemisphere are dropping super fast now into long low night.

Yes, quite so, indeed every year readers may count on this site to babble about seasonal changes as though the gradual darkening of days was a new thing. And yet, golly dammit, after a whole summer it always feels fresh!

Hrmph, yes, well then, let's continue our mutual trajectories and only take a tiny slice of time to

Nerderism
I'll openly admit it's been a rough year, one in which reasons for living have found themselves few on the ground and scarce in the trees. It's been all too easy to see something new and exciting only to chew it down like jerky into cuds of disappointment. I've been accused by friends of not being able to enjoy or like anything lately, and the worst part is I've agreed with those accusations.
I've seen Prometheus and The Dark Knight Rises and Dredd and found myself with nothing to say except to bitch and complain and attempt to seize conversation just long enough to say how crappy I feel these fresh new things to be.

But hark! Something is good! It's this:

I never thought a goofy comic crossover could be anything other than ass. And yet IDW's Star Trek Next Gen/Dr. Who crossover series Assimilation^2 delivers core Trek and core Who simultaneously, meaningful to both. Scott Tipton and David Tipton deserve mass props for plunking the worlds' words into such distinct shapes.
If you, dear readers, find yourself in a comic shop in the next little bit, and if you've ever given a millipoop about either Trek or Who, then I'd heartily suggest you ask about "that Star Trek/Doctor Who comic that just came out." It's still coming out, so let's buckle up for fantastical science-adventure!

APE
APE, by which I mean the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco at the Concourse Exhibition Center, is coming up two and a half weeks from now, October 13th and 14th weekend. Who's ready? Certainly not me, as I'm booked to deliver a 45-minute talk about Twenty Years of Bob the Angry Flower thusly:

I haven't even started to put this presentation together yet, so y'all can be assured it'll be a barn-cracking good time when it eventually manifests itself, particularly given Eisner-winning Shannon Wheeler's harsh and unrelenting masterhood of ceremonies! Show up to see and question! And then buy
some books, why not?Fri, Sep 21 - Important Analysis
Sorely needed in these irrational times, and who better to consult on such matters thanMike Ross talks to Bob!
It's true. Mike Ross of gigcity.ca had a searing conversation with Bob the Angry Flower. It's all here at this link about Mike Ross's interview with Bob the Angry Flower at GigCity . They talk about the new book
and why you should buy it. It's compelling content!
Fri, Sep 14 - Exclusive
Experience now, and only now, here for the very first time, a bold cartoon entitledFri, Sep 7 - Inside Sanity
For all readers who never got the chance to check out, live, the wondrous exertions of last week's Acro-Cats... I sorrow for you. Truly those cats were better showpeople than so many multitudes of humans paid serious human currency-coins to likewise entertain. We try, us humans, and sometimes we deliver. But when faced with the pure emergent quality displayed by performing cats... well, we people can only play all-too-earnest catchup.

Daleks be popping
As an acknowledged human, I've had a longstanding fascination with the physicality and mentality of those wondrously terrible beings we all know as the Daleks.

Admittedly, the Daleks are fictional. Thus, real people shouldn't spend so much time on Daleks' non-existent problems and natures.

And yet... creators keep making episodes of Doctor Who and keep extending the Daleks' fictional existence for hapless folks like me, whether we like it or not. Case in point, last week's new episode The Asylum of the Daleks.

I'm coming to the gradual realization that I don't care about the Doctor, or Amy, or the Doctor and Amy and Rory, or all the permutations of their fanciful human-like interactions. I discover that all I care about is Dalek nature. I want to know what it's like to be a Dalek. I feel connected to these ruined, mutated once-humans, distorted by war and radiation, retreated to their travel machines with nothing left but brilliance and the will to survive. I want to know what it's like to be an insane Dalek. Indeed, when it comes to a visit to the Asylum of the Daleks, I simply want an introduction to

Plus, Daleks are really satisfying to draw!
Fri, Aug 31 - AcroCats!
Man, sometimes it's really worth it to go and do something you normally wouldn't. Take, for instance, the Amazing Acro-Cats. A friend at the bar, while flipping through a copy of the Stranger, found an ad for a cat show. A cat show? What's a cat show? None of us knew. She expressed an interest in seeing it, and a number of listeners readily agreed to go check it out. Not all of us are cat-fanciers, mind; indeed, skepticism prevailed throughout the group, and many mocking jests were made prior to the show. We figured we'd go see the crazy cat lady and at least have a story to tell.

Now, I'm not going to claim this was the greatest entertainment ever presented, but dammit, it was a fun time. The cat lady was not a crazy cat lady at all, but a rather charming, self-effacing cat lady with a witty sense of humor about herself and her cat show. And what's a cat show? Why, it's a show in which cats walk on poles, jump through rings, roll on balls and, in the finale, bat away at cat-appropriate instruments such as cowbells and wind chimes to create 20 to 30 seconds of cat-generated (and, briefly, chicken-generated) musical sounds.

The trick to a cat show, you see, is in not trying to get a few cats to do a lot of tricks; rather, you get a lot of cats to do one trick each. Once you've laid out these ground rules and gotten the audience on your side, you can run an amusing line of patter around the cats' responses and non-responses to the general enjoyment of all. It's like watching a prop comic's act, except the props are cats.

The remarkable thing, and why I bring it up at all, was how all the snarkiness and irony I expected to direct at the experience melted away in the face of the cat lady's earnest sincerity. There was a simplicity and honesty in the show that was charming as hell. We were a buch of ironic, cynical dicks looking to laugh at some idiotic gong show, and we left as a happy group bearing warm and easy smiles. Now THAT's entertainment!

It's a guh-guh-guh...!
And speaking of shows about things, here's a cartoon!Fri, Aug 24- 8Days to DALEK
Sorry, cats, ladies and readers, I'm really just too busy trying to discover how mad a Dalek would have to be to not just exterminatad by its/his/hers fellows but rather committed to an Asylum of the Daleks. When you start with Dalek insanity, what does it mean to be insane by their standards?
Tantalizing! However, in the meantime, as we all wait, please amuse yourselves with a discussion about how

Fri, Aug 17 - And Then
you are faced with another crucial choice. THE crucial choice. No time to think, no time to act, only time to do what you can to preserve the

and in case that's not enough, HAVE YOU BOUGHTYET?????
And if not, why not? It's an honest question. Please be descriptive. Fri, Aug 9 - BUY BUY BUY
Howdy all, just lettin' you know the newest and 8th Bob the Angry Flower book,
How to Operate a Chair, thusly displayed:
is now for real for sale. BUY IT FOR THE LOVE OF ALL YOUR GODS!

Escape
Meanwhile, a lot of folks are busy trying to figure out the best political course of action when a crazy madman takes the time to, in front of them: murder two football teams, display a nuclear bomb, and shoot the only man on Earth able to disarm said bomb. Chances are this madman will also deliver a load of impossible dribble about turning the city over to the people but, luckily, he will also offer the best, strongest and most willful members of the audience a good solid chance at redemption in

Geek Girl Con
Oh, and short notice, but for any of you Seattleites out there, drop by ye olde Geek Girl Con this weekend at the Conference Center. It's Geeky, it's Girly, it's Conny and there will be Bob the Angry Flower books for sale in the Artists Alley area. And yes, I'm aware
that I'm not a girl, but I am a geek, and that is enough.
Fri, Aug 3 - Hulking
Sometimes somebody comes into your life. It may be a real person, or it may just be a person you've seen on TV. Whatever the course this person took, it lead them to you, and you are forever changed as a result. For me, this week, it's Nightlife Expert Jon Taffer, the impossibly ugly brutish star of Spike TV's Bar Rescue. I can't explain or justify how or why he touched me so deeply, but deeply touch me he did, and in kneeling obesiance I offer in his name

The Dark Knight, Risible
I haven't really gotten enormously into this movie publicly, but the folks over at, I guess, jest.com seem to have seen the same movie I did.
Fri, Jul 27 - Doing Best
Thank goodness we live in a world where people with augmented abilities -- "super-heroes," if you will
-- have devoted themselves to helping others. With the many arrays of social suffering, whether they be crime or poverty or rank injustice, we can always count on these anonymous heroes to step forward for the good of all. So let's raise a glass or four to these unsung champions who do the best for everyone, never needed our thanks or congratulations, every night putting themselves on the line

Fri, Jul 20 - The bat... maaaan
I trust all you everyfolks had a good handful of days the last little bit. And to you Comic-Con 2012ers, even more so; sad I couldn't join and be there and sell you some books. But sometimes events occur in life that obviate other obligations and the last coupla weeks was one of thems.

COMICS???
I didn't update last week, so there are two this week, and they are

and

Minor laffs abound!

Chrome Alert!
A quick note to angryflower.com readers who also dwell on Facebook: Google Chrome has started seriously messing with basic html and simple tags such that Facebook sharing buttons on comic pages are rendered unusable and every strip is labelled "angryflower.com/null.html." Like many internet collapses on this site I swear I'll try to fix it, but like so many, I probably won't because I don't know how.

Seriously it's messed up. Chrome doesn't present an option to view the page source (base HTML), and if you save an html file and examine it, you'll somehow find it went from 8 lines of HTML
to 97 lines of unwordwrapped-in-Notepad extra garbage. How? Friends, these are the mysteries of the Internet! Let us all enjoy!

Yes, yes, I know. This is the Internet screaming at me to upgrade. Good ol' HTML is simply no more allowed and I'm being told, forcefully, that I must evolve or die.

What am I getting at? Just that this fumbling Web 0.2 site is messed up and broken (a shocking surprise to regular readers, I am sure!), and that while I haven't figured out how to fix the problem, I do know it's occurring and I must evenmore worry about how to upgrade this Webular Internetted Siteplace into something viewable by 21st-Century folks. Perhaps I'll hire the Peel Library kids who converted the entire history of the University of Alberta Student Newspaper The Gateway into internet-readable form! What a great way to move money to people who need it! Fri, Jul 8 - Spinning
Golly everybody, what I'd really like to do right now is tell you how awesomely the amazing new Bob the Angry Flower book, How to Operate a Chair, will be available for purchase at this year's San Diego Comic-Con.

Regrettably, for friend death reasons, that will not be so. I won't be attending this year's Comic-Con selling the new book How to Operate a Chair, nor will I be present at the 20th Anniversary of Bob the Angry Flower
panel previously scheduled from 3 to 4 Saturday in Room 4. To all you who wish sorrow and sorry this way, thank you. Thank you and Ssorry back, and some more thanks. You're quite right; it sucks. Nonetheless, it's happening.

The new Bob book, How to Operate a Chair, will appear freshly at this year's Alternative Press Expo, this year San Francisco Oct 13 & 14. Furthermore, links will soon appear on this page on how to order the book directly and awesomely from ComixPress.com.

In the Meantime
Let's all laugh a bit at terror and awfulness, thuslyThurjun29_12 - PostSolstice
Welcome to the other side, folks. What other side? Why, the other side of the northern hemisphere's maximal sun intake of 2012, of course. From now on until late December days get shorter, friends, and once you've exhausted all the gags at Prometheus's expense you simply have no other choice but to seek out and indulge inWed, Jun 20 - Lord
Oh, if only there was one of you, Lord, if only you were around to take notice. Sadly, regrettably, you remain silent for reasons of your own and you insist we get by with material examinations of such mysteries as

Thur, June 14 - And by the way
here's a comic about nothing right this moment very particular, not about any movie or current event, just some classic old-skool Bob stupidness taking the form of aFri, Jun 8 - Movie Times
Dammit, I am in no mood at all to be disappointed byFri, June 1 - Coming Soon
May I present

Yep, it's that time of two-year where a young man's fancy turns to making another Bob the Angry Flower book. Bob the Angry Flower: How to Operate a Chair will be the 8th Bob book, and if I may say, this one's a corker! Not only does it have a number of wildly amusing comics in it, but this particular baby features over 25 wacky Bob pinups from some of comics' and games' most brilliant creators such as Shannon Wheeler, Ted Rall, Keith Knight, Matt Bors, Jen Sorensen, Ruben Bolling, Rich Werner, Tom Beland and Karin Madan. The breadth, creativity and individuality these pinups displays leaves me in awestruck abasement, especially since I suddenly realize I spelled Jen's name wrong throughout the book. Goddammit!

The book will debut at this year's San Diego Comic-Con (July 11-15), with online sales here at angryflower.com beginning simultaneously. So, Bob fans, I heartily urge you to consider purchasing at least two copies of this most auspicious object the moment you become able, allowing you to truthfully boast to your children, grandchildren and great-nephews that you got it "right then." It's a fun book!

Cartoonz
As we speed away from the confounding events of the Zenth/Penrose storyline, please allow yourself a light palate-cleanser of a Bob strip, an old-fashioned gag which invites us all to do everything we possibly canFri, May 25 - An End
Things can be odd, stuff can be weird and the world can be bursting with confusing mixtures of good and evil, truth and falsity, reality and imagination, life and death. When posed with such perplexing conundrums, sometimes the proper response --the only rational response-- is simply to Fri, May 18 - Heart Penrose
Really, he's pretty much the coolest mathematician going right now. He loves the purity and artistic wonder of pure math structures but he's mindful of the need to seriously get real if you're going to apply your noodlings to mathematical physics and he also took the time to write a 900-page book about all of it and refused to ditch the math to make it understandable because dammit, knowing the math is what makes it understandable.

I don't know the math, but somebody does, and that's why we need to hold on just

By now everybody knows The Avengers is loads of laughs . A movie doesn't get to 93% on Rotten Tomatoes by sucking or being forgettable. If you're reading this you've seen it and likely you agree. So much fun. Hulk thrashes ass. Tony Stark is good juice every time he appears. Hawkeye has moments. Black Widow has moments. Captain America gets moments! ThorĂ˘â‚¬Â¦ well, Thor got the least of the goods but if you think back even he got plenty to do. Audiences agree: Avengers is awesome.

And though I thoroughly enjoyed The Avengers, I must say Armond has a point.. The film is empty entertainment. It is fully directed at satisfying the audience. It never confounds or threatens them. There's little sense of danger. Does Avengers do the true work of art, challenging and troubling and expanding and deepening its audience's human experiences? Ultimately, fun as it is, it doesn't.

Essentially, the Avengers is a big bursting bowl of popcorn entertainment. Fun to eat but meaningless after. Utterly empty.

OrĂ˘â‚¬Â¦ is it? Many many films have been offered to the public as big bowls of popcorn but this particular one has found itself to the audiences' taste where so many previous such offerings have been consumed and hated (Transformers 3 being an excellent example, a movie I fell asleep during). Most summer superspectaculars promise a bowl of popcorn but deliver instead an ashtray of burnt corn and unpopped kernels. Yet Avengers is different. Why?

I would say it is because it is an exceedingly well-popped bowl of popcorn. There is artistry in the popping of the corn. How? The Avengers is about connections over time. Let me give you some examples:

Example 1: There's that scene early on, Steve Rogers/Captain America's first scene in the gym. We've already been smoothly transitioned into this (coming from "No, it's fought by soliders" from Nick Fury's previous SHIELD cabal scene). Cap's doing his thing, punching bags. He and Fury do some banter and then there's the bit where Cap says, "I doubt there's anything that would surprise me," to which Fury responds, "Bet you ten bucks."

Most summer blockbustersplosions would have left it at that. Quip accomplished; let's move on. Avengers delivers the joke, and then, as we who watched it know, it drops the actual punchline several scenes later, when Steve Rogers wordlessly digs a ten out of his jacket and hands it to Fury on the bridge of the airborne Helicarrier.

The Avengers is filled with these kinds of slightly delayed gratifications. Here's another:

Example 2: In the first Tony/Banner scene in the Helicarrier lab, there's the moment we all remember when Tony's chatting Banner up and then suddenly stabs him with a pin. Banner looks up with amused surprise just as Cap walks in and calls Tony out for provoking Banner and endangering everybody. The scene plays out from there as Tony and Steve bitch at each other and Cap leaves the scene unsettled. Other scenes ensue, and then we return to another scene with Tony and Banner where Tony says to Bruce something like, "You're on tiptoes, my friend. You need to strut." It's a joke that isn't just a joke on its own, but a moment that connects. Tony wants to see Banner strut and so do we, so when Bruce Banner finally lets loose it feels amazing.

It would seem like these kind of simple this-and-then-that storytelling techniques should bore audiences. And they wouldĂ˘â‚¬Â¦ except that modern super summer action blockbuster movies just don't seem able to accomplish even these basic building blocks of how to get an audience onside.

In a modern empty blockbuster, action scenes don't erupt because the stakes have been raised to the level of immediate action on the part of the participants. Instead, action scenes now occur to escape from supposedly dramatic scenes that are going nowhere or --even worse-- to get out of scenes that might be in danger of resolving the plot right then and there. Velocity is invoked for its own sake or as a reward for sitting through all the scenes of actors talking.

That's not to say Avengers doesn't indulge in a lot of this. But at least Avengers does it knowingly while maintaining the primary importance of connections. Scenes conect to scenes, characters connect to characters and ideas connect to moments. So, when the big extended 45-minute action sequence begins, we're ready for big moments that have been set up and perhaps not paid offĂ˘â‚¬Â¦ which is why those moments, when they arrive, are so damn satisfying.

Setups and payoffs. Connections between people and ideas. And since that's what this whole movie, ultimately, is really about --a bunch of people who make no sense together coming together and yet they doĂ˘â‚¬Â¦ that is, The Avengers-- the whole thing not only feels good but IS good. It means something after all!
Fri, May 11 - The Zenth Is/Are

And the Avengers?
I'm still collecting my thoughts, so I'll give the stragglers another week before blasting everyone with spoilers. So far it's awesome crowd-pleasing fun, empty and ultimately trivial... or is it?
Fri, May 4, Avenger Day
It's always made me a little sad that the Marvel universe all-star team named itself The Avengers in response to DC's Justice League. Generally speaking I'd rather be on the side of justice versus vengeance. At the same time, I'm a Marvel kid through and through so I'm looking forward to some avenging!

At Any Rate
another Bob the Angry Flower cartoon appears now:Fri, April 27 - RETURNING
Just when we thought old issues had been dealt with and laid to rest, somehow they arise again as we explore the multivariant complexities of

Cabin in the Woods
I'll follow the established non-spoiler approach to discussing this movie in that I recommend it, it's fun, it's interesting, it has revealing things to say about horror movies.

SPOILERSSSS!!!!
Curiously, given all everybody says about how the movie runs on surprises, it really doesn't. Instead it runs on insight and analysis, speaking to the audience as though they understood or were about to understand everything it has to say. It plays its biggest "surprise" at the outset, in the very first scene, playing its trump card to be understood and appreciated.

It's clever. It's clever almost to a fault, and it grieves me to say this, because had I been clever enough to come up with its approach I would have played it out the same way. I would have tossed suspense in favor of examination. I would have gone for gags rather than mystery. I would have sought to illuminate, to bring light to a world built on shadows and darkness.

I keep saying "I would've," but I didn't. Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, they put this idea and approach together; they made it work on its own terms. Go see it! See it and see it with other folks! See it and talk about it! It's super cool!
Wed, April 18 - Bejillickers!!!
I don't know about you folks (and yet I fear I do), but the last little bit has been quicker and more flavorful than late.
Good? Yes? Evil? No?

Can't decide???

In such cases I've found it useful to

Fri, April 13 - Moneyball
Last year wasn't really all that super great for movies. Not a whole lot stuck out. I will, however, confess a latter day attraction to Moneyball, a movie I would not have expected to like or even be interested in. Of course it helped that it hit me where I'm most vulnerable, as we see in

Book 8!
Golly, I can feel it, coming into shape, arriving, forcing itself into existence. Got some neato stuff gonna be in it. I think you folks will dig! Fri, April 6 - Hail n such
I'm told that an icestorm of hail arrived itself on our streets of Seattle yesterday. I must have missed it, eating a mushroom/italian sausage crepe with parmiagiana sauce as I was. Apparently it came at went quickly and only bothered Seattleites who
happened to dare to be outside during the key thirty minutes or so.

Regardless, all this is meaningless in the context of the extraordinary, life-affirming, sex-having Zenth storyline which continues to present itself along such lines as

Gaming and Hungry
I'll take a moment or two to speak on the Hunger Games movie. I'd read the first book and it seemed it could easily be made into a film. It was punchy, dynamic and visual, and while it focused (as novels do) on the internal consciousness of the main character Katniss, there would be obvious ways to externalize these feelings into a story for the screen.

When the movie came out, I watched it on opening night and spent the first half trembling with frustration and anger as I found myself constantly ejected from the film by jerky camera movements and unnecessary cuts. It was as though the filmmakers had consciously built into their film a suite of 5, 7 and 8-year-olds constantly kicking the back of my seat.

"Here's a scene between Katniss and her young sister Prim. Let's cut and jump all the time so we can't focus on these two characters or how they feel about each other. Instead let's constantly skitter and scutter because it's 'real,' forever preventing the audience from feeling the film, engaging with the characters, entering the film narrative or enjoying the story."

I literally (actually literally) spent the first half of the film trembling with ever-increasing rage, ever more frustrated at the filmmakers' refusal to allow me to watch their film, seriously considering getting up and walking out, only balking because I sat with a group of friends whose experience I wished not to interrupt.

(soilers)
After all this jittery nonsense in preventing me from feeling anything and dragging me along with events I was never allowed to properly experience, we arrive at the Tributes' Parade, an obviously cinematic sequence displaying Katniss in all her compromised glory along with her fellow tribute Peeta, both presented to a blase future society as incredible wonderments, the Girl On Fire (along with the Boy on Fire) wearing sci-fi future outfits of astonishing flame.

Honestly my fingernails bit into my palms with anger as this sequence once again shoved my eyes away from the spectacle. I never got a chance to be with Katniss during this moment. I wasn't able to absorb the both of them uncomfortably dealing with their roles as dolls in the best dress-up ever. And I couldn't feel pleased and satisfied as a confortable Central Section audience member seeing the lowly tributes paraded before me. Jittering shaking jump cuts, cinematic styles I must imgaine were intended to draw me into the world and the moment, instead forced me away from the story every second and half second. Seriously I think at one point I licked blood from my fingernail-gouged palms, was the rage.

Thankfully the movie entered the second half, the actual killzone. Here the filmmakers' "You can't-see-anything" aesthetic made more sense, so I didn't feel constantly assaulted by the stylishtic choices. And when Katniss (spoilers) gave Rue what she could as a burial and presents her defiant hand gesture to the camera she knows is there, only to cut away to Rue's Section and their boiling anger and Rue's father exploding in uncontrollable rage, then and only then the movie hit me for real. It meant something, more than the books had at that point. I wept.

So, go see the Hunger Games! Expect spastic camera actions and edits. Wonder why you don't feel as connected to the characters and the story as you did when you read the book (assuming you did). Take moments as you can. Enjoy Jennifer Laurences's Katniss as best you're allowed to. Try to feel relationships and emotions in defiance of the filmmakers' stylic indifference or open hostility to same. And, y'know, read some books and some more!
Fri, Mar 30 - Enough Marching
Yeah, yeah, it's been fun lingering in March. I personally greatly appreciate not having to go into April until I had to. But go we must, have to we all, so here's a quick Bob the Angry Flower cartoon to accompany on the journey.

Fri, Mar 23 - A Game of Hunger
Hey, readers! Are you excited about the Hunger Games movie? If you're not, you should consider becoming so cuz it's about to be the giant thing. I advise getting on board one way or the other, either by reading the book or books, or by watching the movie, or by firmly establishing a "Fuck Hunger Games" stance right now, cuz get ready. If the lineup outside the Cinerama Thursday night for the 12:01 screening is any indication, we're about to be culturally inundated with hungry, hungrier and ever hungriest games.

As though we weren't already.

Anyway, I meanwhile promised last week that we'd be out under and away from the worst of the Zenth storyline. Judge for yourselves if it's so, thusly:

Fri, Mar 16 - The Worst
Once we get out under and ahead of

chances improve for all of us being better off. Or at the least such is my firm belief.
Fri, Mar9 - Zenthy
Sorry folks and
Bob readers but you're on another story journey. I've been drawing comics twice a week for three weeks to make pages and here's the first of the fiercelessly hopeless awful new stuff, utter babble going by the nomenclature of

Readers Recommend!
As far back as Feb 3, 2012 I called out to readers to launch suggestions for the next, 8th, Bob the Angry Flower book. Many of you responded, and I received far more notions than I ever thought possible.

The title's not yet quite ready, but readers be assured. Though no contest was announced, prizes will be given. Submitters who nailed the title will get books. Furthermore, many submitters who submitted amusing titles will also get books.

Appearance
Occasionally it behooves this page to recognize the existence of anything beyond it, and this is one of those times. Thankfully there's a Bob the Angry Flower-related reason to go, in this case one of a powerful depiction in the midst of an overall story so brilliantly right it could not have come from any other brainpen than Jason Yungbluth of Weapon Brown, Clarissa and Zogg of WhatIsDeepFried.com. If you have any interest at all in a perfectly realized wasteland filled with the broken corrupted refuse of the Sunday edition comix pages, do start at the beginning with Weapon Brown. It's shockingly vulgar.
Fri, Mar 2 - Yes it's March
Snuck up on us, it did, March 2012, lurking behind February's leap year extra day before springing out from the bushes all fangs and teeth and pillows and stuff. Bastard! Why does March always have to be such a dick of a month? Or perhaps, wait, it's not March's fault, maybe we should all instead blame the Fri, Feb 24 - Remember
To kick off this special Academy award-oriented angryflower post, I am proud to present Paul Notley's Alternate Academy Award List, covering the years 1927 to our current days. I'll admit it's a bit baffling for the first few decades, but once you get into the years you remember, it's pretty neato! He gave Best Picture in 1981 to Raiders of the Lost Ark for the sake of God! GENIUS!

And speaking of Oscar-winners, one should always avoid the Fri, Feb 17 - Super Bowing
How long ago was the Super Bowl? Six eternities? And yet I can remember almost like it was earlier today, just after lunch, the strong, insistent emotions I felt

Fri, Feb 10 - CUBE!!!
We haven't moved far into this particular month of this particular year, but we've gone far enough for us to really, truly, emphatically and deeply re-evaluate our understanding of gelantinous cubes and their natures.
We've found it easy to dismiss their personhood, their character, their habit of screaming "Cube" whenever random adventurers make their random appearances. It's appalling and it needs to stop and it's all a terrible result of selfish

Book 8 Title Names
Last week I asked for some suggestions for the title of the next and eighth Bob the Angry Flower book. I'm humbled and delighted at the ideas, notions, possibilities and lively names I've received. Readers who sent stuff in, thank you. I've had a handful of ideas churning around already, but many of your submissions are forcing me to stop and rethink. Funny stuff coming in from many sides, good ideas of which I hadn't conceived. Ultimately the book can only have one name, but to all of you who have launched proposals myward: you have helped to create this next book. I am grateful. Additional notions may be delivered thiswards, and I hope to hell and damn I can come through for you on the final product. Uhhhh... EXCELSIOR!
Fri, Feb 3 - Unification
blah blah blah blahdebalh some stuff for this part of the web site updating

Oh! Pardon! Didn't see you folks there! I was just trying to get a simple template down for elementary updates such as the following

a cartoon of the simple sort, making no pretense to wider relevance or import.

New Book Number 8!
Hey, readers, there's another Bob book coming up, debuting July 2012 at San Diego Comic-Con.

But OH NO! I haven't finished it, nor do I even have a title!

If any regular readers, all 36 to 87 of you, have ideas for titles for the new book, please send them my way!
Fri, Jan 27,2012
And so we arrive at another Friday, another seven-day span where most of us are still alive. It certainly seems a bit silly to blabble on about these kinda days, but honestly I have no choice.

Thus, here all bear witness to theFri, Jan 20 - Snowmageddon
Yow! We had a whole lot of snow in Seattle this week. Generally snowfall in itself is no big story, but Seattle being as uncomfortably geographical as it is, the slushy deluge shut the city down for two days, with hundreds of thousands of people left without power. I count myself incredibly lucky not to have been in their number, as my place would've rapidly cooled to freezing without the intervention of electrical heat. Let's hope the power crews are able to get stuff up and running as fast as possible.

On the theme of disaster, then, I present

**Note: A drunken fool gained access to angryflower.com and posted the following spray of madness as an update. While it would be simple to edit the mess into readability or erase it entirely, I think it's important to leave the incoherent nonsense as it is as a reminder of the critical importance of not allowing soused idiots anywhere near HTML editing software.**Friday, Jan 13 Januraies

Go on Mark Millar's Wanted kill-everbody super fun times, as though we never cared about anything other than bad shitty horrible killing and somehow bad shitty horrible killible of everbody getting cool enough so's we all love super-killing and then some.

I don't quite to mean that every action is like unto a torture, not do I imagine that every action performed beyonded will always leaded to horror.

At best I'd hope independendt actions could go out themselves and build individual Alchemies in the Kush Edmonton Neighborhods. I honestly hope you all people and readers string great hope throughout across as many funs and peopleness as you are able. I will confess I slept a lot and then more so, slumbering deepling as best as I could into possible moments of crazed hilarious world-destructions and cute-girl dream-madmadnessses.And some cartoons:

I'll go on to say it was great this full 2011-endyear, cool and easy, leaving the dog and cats to places and people who fully rather did them better on comfort than I would've myself.

Gave me time to hang with humans, and humans I did hang with, groups and piles of them, Edmontonians abounding, honestly fun folk throughout. Seriously, non-Edmonton readers, it''s a chilled but good time to slide around.

And I've been a terrible person to which to listen for the last few runs of word. TERRIBLE, I say!
Oh, and there's a new strip. Please enjoy and learn from
Fri, Wed, Dec 26 - UrrrOrrggg
It's a comic!
Wed, Dec 21 - Christmastime
That's right. I said it. Christmas. As in Noel, as in old school mangers, as in wise men and special stars and babies born to Jewish virgins. Suck it, haters. All you wacky believers in non-Christian religions are just going to have to deal.

Seeing as how it's Christmas, that typically means I'm heading back to Edmonton for the occasion, and so it is this time around. As a result, I'll not be here to do Bob the Angry Flower updates until next year, and as a result of that, I now present to you the year's final two cartoons, one after the other. First we have

for your Christmas edification.
Once you've finished rubbing various oils and myrrhs on your gut to ease the pain of all the laffs, you may then proceed to

for additional jollity and moral scolding.

Is that it? Seems so. I hope all you wonderful folks enjoy the rundown to the rest of the year, and hey... today's the solstice, I believe! YEAAAAAAAAHHHHH! Days start getting longer again! YESSSSS. See y'all next year!
Fri, Dec 16 - Yep
Hope all y'alls getting ready to bid farewell to this 2011 thang, cuz it's going away no matter how you feel.
Here's a strip to deaden the pain and make it light-hearted!

Fri, Dec 9 - Oh, the Weather Outside
...isn't too bad, actually; for the moment, relative clemency prevails. I just got back from checking out a neat little Star Wars art show half a block from my apartment (good nerd site io9.com has story and pictures here).
It was similar to the Muppet Rawk show I saw a few weeks ago, in which local artists did various album covers with Muppets, but different in that it also featured a lot of pieces officially licensed by Lucasfilm, including animation sketches from the Family Guy parodies. Generally the whimsical local renditions are more interesting, but there was some pretty damn hot licensed stuff in there as well, and I say this as a thoroughly jaded Star Wars fan. It's always striking to see dozens of diverse artists turned loose on a touchstone cultural icon. You get your head spun around every time.

Fri, Dec 2 - Good Lord
It's December already? How the hell did that happen? Sneaky work, 2011, sneaky work. Though, to be honest, I won't be sorry to put this year behind us; it's been a bit sucky. Besides, next year will be the astonishing 20th anniversary of Bob the Angry Flower. Impossible to believe, but it's the truth. Way back in 1992 ol' Bob made his Molotovin' way into all of our lives, and somehow he's still annoying us with goofy adventures such as

Fri, Nov 18 - ZipzapSay
Hey, y'all, this week we're gonna do something a teeny bit different. I'm out for the weekend and the following week, but rather than post the one and then the other a week or two later, let's try posting the done comics all at once! Shocking, alarming and wrongheaded, but it's going to occur. So bolt yourselves down for not one but TWO Bob the Angry Flower cartoons this week, knowing that next week there won't be a new strip and just a flailing web site update without a strip to justify its existence. MAN, that had better be a good update!

Daring and exciting, I think we can all agree! Here's this week's strip, a nerdy yelling on physics I've decided to call

And then, if your guts have settled down after the tumultuous laughter the previous cartoon set in motion --and do take your time, I know hilarious comics can set both body and soul a-shivering beyond their normal tolerances-- I hasten y'all to gaze your wondered eyes on a cartoon far more physical and organic, distressing, disturbing and enlightening, a strip speaking to all of our hearts and needs called

Fri, Nov 11 - Descending Up
Whoa damn, that daylight savings time switch sure hit hard this week. Yeah, we got the extra hour on Sunday, and yes, I napped the hell out of that hour with great satisfaction. Several times over Sunday, I looked up, saw it was an hour earlier and took on another refreshing half-hour snooze. Several times.

But as with all things good, the price must be paid in triplicate. And so it is we discover the sky cloaked in rampant blackness around 5 o'clock. Suddenly, as though by magic! Welcome to the slide in towards Winter Solstice, gentlefolk and additional people. Welcome. Hope you enjoy the ever-darkening view!

I'm oddly into this part of the year, and I'm sure if I went back to last year's post this time I'd find myself expressing precisely the same sentiments I'm typing now. I'm terrified to look for fear of succumbing to the temptation to simply copy n' paste.

Being in the rundown to the finish line of the year is what I like about this time of the season. Knowing it's gonna keep getting darker for another month or so, but when we sail past December 22nd, 2011 we'll know we're on the other side with longer and brighter days ahead of us all the way up to June 20, 2012, a wonderful amazing midsummer day
when everything starts turning to crap again.

I really need to stop being so interested in seasonal change. It gets super boring. Here, then, is this week's Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, cunningly entitled

Fri, Nov 4 - Post-we'en
I hope all you wonderful folks out there had an enjoyable Hallowe'en, filled with fantasy and favor, liquor and beer and pigs-in-blankets. Especially the pigs-in-blankets part. I had some this Hallowe'en and let me tell you, if you didn't, you're missing out. So deliciously weinery!

It seems to be getting noticably colder out there as well, so I trust you good people will bundle up accordingly with all appropriate
Oh, and one more thing. I know I'm grindingly behind the curve on this as I am on most things, but golly, Parks and Recreation is a jolly good show! You should watch it! Ron is my sudden new hero of all things.
Fri, Oct 28 - Craft Work
It's gonna be a quick and tight little update this week, y'all. I took the last week off and now it's down to a matter of hours to create some kind of comprehensible Hallowe'en costume
for Friday at the PopCap offices.

So I do hope you will all forgive me, not just for the slenderness of this particular update but also for the rambling madhouse Daleksex-mania content of last week's post. Sometimes... sometimes weekly cartoonist/bloggers go nutballz, and rather than inflicting their crazed mumblings on random passersby on the street, they deploy their twisted dreams to all humanity via this compu-linked network of stuffs.

Do I have a point? Only that I intend to devote the rest of the evening to wigs and scissors and tape and sheets of colored paper, but before I can do any of that I am obliged to ensure that you all you wonderful, wonderful people, readers all, have full access to

Fri, Oct 21- Dalek Sex?
Do Daleks have sex? And I don't mean, I'm not asking if Daleks bone each other. I'm wondering if Daleks appreciate and understand the notion of sex.

Not gender, as in the distinctions between he and she, that is to say linguistic distinctions. I'm just curious if Daleks have any impression of sex as a biological distinction, as a species divided into two biofoms with separate roles in biological reproduction.

We already know Daleks do not make gender (linguistic) distinctions. Daleks do not have hes and shes in their language.
Indeed, the only way we know Daleks tell each other apart is purely through status and shell coloration. High-status Black Daleks issue orders to non-blacks. Non-blacks, regular Daleks, perform their duties as ordered. How do non-black Daleks distinguish between themselves? We simply don't know. They say "I obey," but do they really identify themselves through "I," linguistically?

Obviously the named Daleks, the Cult of Skaro, are able to use specific identity identifiers for each other, but as far as we know, they're the only ones.

But do Daleks have any notion of sex, biologically? Are they aware of male and female as separate slices of a single species, through which genetic variation may be advanced without having to wait for random mutation? They are, after all, the ultimate mutations of the Kaled race, a race much like our our own, a human-like race that had given over all to victory and science, knowing the results of radiated transformations, even before Davros's distortions. Somehow they went from a human-like race into a one-eyed mutated cloneblob encased in shells. Was there anything of sex left after that transformation and degradation?

Seemingly not, since we've never seen evidence of sex (biological distinction) or gender (linguistic differentiation through pronouns) in any of our encounters with them.

Why am I so interested in Dalek sexes and genders and in how Dalek sexes and genders are distinguished from each other? Only beacuse I need to be interested in something at the moment. So, sexy gendered Daleks, you're IT!

Why yes, folks, now you ask: am I mad? Quite so. I am fully mad. I wish this new cartoon conveyed the curent insanity but it only hints. Still, we must not forget the importance of terminologies, to wit:

Fri, Oct 14 - Chillz
I know, I know, referring to weather being in any way "cold" here in Seattle is as laughable as a clown barrel of monkey japes, particularly to folks who hail from, say, Edmonton. Still, t'was a drear chill in the air this rapidly darkening eve, a whisper of what's to come, bepeaking shivering and dampness on the way --and that's not even considering the wreath of ice soon to descend on my fellow Canadians up in Canadia. Brrrr. Bundle up, folks! Could be a cold one this year.

Strippy
On occasion drawn funnies are presented to the public on this "web site," and so indeed we see such now, a tidbit calledFri, Oct 6 - One Returns
From APE, of course, the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco, held this last weekend in the Concourse Exhibition Center, site of many independent cartoonists and many many many many many many many many many many many more excited vaporous water molecules whose sworn duty was to induce sweat and swampy heat on the indy strippers for selected hours of the days.

Nonetheless, I would count APE 2011 as a success. Sales, brisket, Keith Knight and his table crew Lonnie Milsap and Ken Tanaka, catsleep, drinks, jobniking with Mirian and Mike (Happly Blirthdays, Mike!), Van de Graffs ionizing air at street partiers, stunning veal ribs, Hark! A Vagrant books and superstar Shannon Wheeler, all packed into the same sweating greenhouse for two days. Don't you wish you'd been there?

Anon, anon, here we present yet another searingly powerful BtAF cartoon:Fri, Sep 30 - Six of one, APE of the other
APEbreak, folks! It's time for the Alternative Press Expo again this very weekend, Oct 1-2, in humid San Francisco at the Concourse Exhibition Center. Come one, come all, see the witless cartoonists attempt to move bound sheaves of paper in exchange for other sheaves of paper! See a number of them succeed while others fail! Featuring for the first time for sale anywhere The Gunt Chronicles in minicomic form! Amazement! Products! Comic books and local funnies! WHEEEEEEEE!

Meanwhile, on the Internet, a cartoon appeared:
Fri, Sep 23 -- Autumnal Equinox
Hey, lads and female folks, welcome to the autumnal equinox! What is the autumnal equinox, you might well ask? Nothing much, really. It's just the day whereby night and day are the same amount of time in our northeren hemisphere of our planet called Earth. Since the summer solstice days have been getting shorter and faster. At this point days will continue to get shorter, but they'll get shorter *faster*. The rate of daylight loss will begin to abate from now until the winter solstice .

Not enormous, and indeed, mostly invisible. Days will continue to get darker and nights will continue to extend. But even as days shrink and nights grow, the night-growing will slow each and every day until it comes to a stop at December 21, whereupon it will reverse and verrrrrrry slowly start to turn into bigger an better new days into 2012.

I find myself babbling far more than I shoud on these Q1/Q3 moments, yapping on and on about our sun fluxes as we decsend into our solar trenches and launch into our solar crests. Indeed I've likely repeated myself a year or two ago or even more recently.

But I can't dismiss the way it feels to live on the crust of a tiny illuminated clot of dirt swirling around a mega-titanic ball of unlikely fusion reactions, particularly as the dirt-ball rotations over time come to allow such things as viruses, jellyfish, turtles and Christmas to manifest themselves.

Fri, Sep 16 - Fall Approaches
Aw, man, I was just starting to really get used to these long, warm evenings, and now they're draining away like syrup down a gutter. Really tasty syrup, no less. Bummer! Someone must be made to answer for this outrage, and in order to identify whom, it's time for a

And hey
While you got a chance, why not play some Pig Up? We added all kinds of crazy new crap to go along with all the old crap! Check it out!
Fri, Sep 9Holy Precious Screaming Mother of Gods

does DHL have some serious problems.

DHL, for folks who may not know, is an international delivery service. Like FedEx. Or the post office. Except international. And cheaper. Much, much cheaper. Though not cheaper than the post office.

What they do, see, is they take money from a person with the promise of taking something from that person and delivering (if you will) that something to another person.

They're pretty good at taking the money and the something. Persons hoping to move a something somewhere are attracted by the low charges DHL asks in recompense for this activity..

Where they have a bit of a falling-down problem, sadly, is in the getting of the something to the place or the person to whom it was sent. The delivery aspect, as it were. The completion of the job, one might say.

Quick story. I arrived home last night to discover a DHL sticker stuck to my door. My eyes rolled. Someone had sent something to my home, where this kind of problem arises constantly, rather than to my work, where it never does.

I took the sticker indoors, called the number, and sought to arrange a different delivery address. I was told, with great patience by DHL's customer service team, that I would have to send a fax back to DHL in order to make that happen.

Was there any way I could do it without sending a fax? Regrettably, there was not. I could, of course, easily sign the sticker on the back to tell the courier to leave it sitting on my front porch. Easiest for everybody, really. The DHL courier leaves the package. Somebody else comes along and takes it for whatever reason. I come home to no package but the confident assurance that the package was, indeed, dropped on my front porch. Everybody wins.

Though I tell a lie. There was a way to have the package redirected without sending a fax. All I had to do was write a note and attach it to the sticker (the sticker not having room enough for the instructions). The note would instruct the courier on how he or she might walk around the block and deliver the something to my building's leasing office.

To be sure, leaving the note was no guarantee. Once I signed the leave-it-on-my-porch line on the sticker, the DHL courier was entirely within his or her rights to ditch the thing on my porch and bail. Any additional hints or suggestions about how he or she might attempt to deliver the packager were of course up to his or her discretion.

It's a little thing called trust.

CARTOON!
Gotta a cartoon for the world, an insightful one filled with... uh... what was the cartoon?Fri, Sep 2 -- Fall Falls
Hey, everybody, welcome to September! We all know what September means, right? It means the end of summer and the beginning of Fall! Jillikers!!!!

Except not quite. A lotta places, particularly northish places, have found their summer pushed over into their fall months and have partied accordingly.

Into this arrives Fri, Aug 26 - Cowliens and Aliboys
Hey, all, yet another week has trundled through the gearworks of our universe (or at least this local bit), and you all know what that means, right? RIGHT? It means another Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, delivered fresh on the internet like a child newborn. Here it is!

Cowboys and Aliens
Finally got around to seeing this. Full disclosure: I've got a grudge against this movie. Back in 2000 I and PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka got together to write a spiffy sci-fi western called Planet Texas. While it was adjudged indeed spiffy, the market for same was cooling with dramatic speed in the wake of the release of Wild Wild West. Jason went off to create Bejeweled and PopCap, I went back to drawing Bob comics, and that was mostly the end of our Hollywood adventures. Every so often, though, we'd hear about a project in development, Cowboys and Aliens, "based" on a graphic novel of dubious quality ("based" in the sense that they kept the name). Resentment, therefore, has always simmered in my breast about this film as it developed.

Now, after a decade and change, the film is made and out. What of it? I only have a few comments.

1) The aliens are stupid and boring. Without getting into spoilers, they look like default Hollywood aliens. They had greasy skin, a basic humanoid shape with disproportions, acted like dumb monsters, and even pulled out the old chestnut of climbing along walls and ceilings just like the aliens in Aliens.

2) Daniel Craig's protagonist character wasn't stupid, but he also wasn't interesting. I never felt connected to him, and I never gave a shit about what he'd gone through or was going through. I got his basic story in the first grainy flashback, so I really didn't need three more grainy flashbacks to fill in the details. It's not Craig's fault he was asked to play an amnesiac character. But unless you're careful, amnesiac characters are not interesting. They weren't careful.

3) Honestly, I think the movie would have benefited if Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford had switched roles. Ford has the ability to catch you and carry you along. Craig is good at reserve and menace. Given that Craig's character was supposed to be the guy you gave a shit about while Ford's character was supposed to be hard and cruel but with slowly revealed chinks in his emotional armor, the casting switch could have brought something interesting to the film that wasn't there when I saw it.

4) Overall, the movie felt like a bachelor's casserole. Characters have arcs, but the arcs don't interact in any meaningful way. Imagine a bag of Shake n' Bake. Now picture stuff you might find in a bachelor's larder. Pieces of porkchop. An egg. Fish heads. Some macaroni. Maybe some jellybeans. Dampen them and toss them into the Shake n' Bake bag one at a time, extract them breaded, dump them in a casserole dish and bake for 10 years. That's the movie. Scenes trundled into each other with all the dramatic intensity of a script that kept looking to hit 130 minutes and continued to come up 70 minutes short.

It's a cool concept --War of the Worlds meets the Old West!-- but when it came to coming up with a story, the ball got punted down the field, out of the stadium, around the block, down the highway, onto a ferry to the next city, back and forth a few times in the next city's park and finally into a bank's marketing department whereupon it was offered drinks, refused them and signed a piece of paper.

Before I saw it, my thumbnail review was that it would turn out to be "Well-produced garbage." And I think I pretty much stand by that. I liked Sam Rockwell, I liked Harrison Ford though he was in the wrong role, and I liked seeing Adam Beach get some work. That, really, was about it.

A shame, because if it had been a giant hit, the market for sci-fi westerns might have heated up enough that a good one might have been able to lurch from the grave and find new life. Instead, we have another decade of fallow before anybody dares try this mixture again. Fri, Aug 19 - Dammit!
Here it is, Monday morning, and I totally forgot to do the update. Worse, I don't even have the excuse of drunken amnesia to deploy; I actually got home last night at a reasonable hour with not a drop of the sauce. If anything, my distraction was far more insidious and embarassing; I ended up playing The Sims Social.

Well, I gotta get to work, so enough blurbling. Here's a cartoon about justice! Fri, Aug 12 - The Apes, How They Rise
Saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes this week. Generally, I liked it. I keep thinking that there have been a slew of action/sci-fi movies which default in their third act to a swarm of [x] breaking out and threatening to destroy humanity, but now I consider the case the only one really popping to mind (awfully) is I, Robot.

Regardless, Rise of the Planet of the Apes does, as the trailers suggest, feature a swarm of [x], in this case apes, breaking out and threatening to destroy humanity. But the appealing thing about RiseOTPOTA is that when it happens, you seriously root for the apes. Yeah, humanity, one thinks, get some!
About time, you damn dirty people!

This, plus the presence of Brian Cox in his standard role as old reliable movie bastard who nonetheless gives his performance some lovely shades of color, puts this one a decent shoulder above this year's slough of summer dreck. Almost memorable, it is.

Tooning
The strip this week is, I'll admit, a bit of a mess, a collision of a number of half-baked angers and frustrations coming together in a lumpy stewpot I've chosen to entitle

Enjoy, my lovelies, enjoy!

Flappin'
And for those who checked out the game I've been working on at PopCap, and for those who have not so checked out (shame on you!), I encourage folks to examine and place themselves on the alar of Pig Up, now featuring new features such as bug fixes, new sound effects, new Style Moves and the exhilarating opportunity to RIDE THE COW (to ride the cow, begin the game and immediately drop towards the ground for fun and moos. Offer void after 20 seconds). And if you do happen to click the link our of idle curiosity, I beg thee to play at least two games and come back the following day and play at least one additional game. Retention numbers are currently everything!

Have a good weekend, y'all!
Fri, Aug 5 - HOW DANDY!
Dandy is as dandy does, I've never said. But now I've said it once, dammit, I'm gonna start saying it all the time! Who doesn't want things to be dandy, and, by extension, do dandy?
Nobody, that's who! In the next few weeks I'll make everyone around me wish they weren't with my insistence of the importance of general dandiness. Mark it.

Speaking of dandy things and ideas, here's a comic-stripple confection

Fri, July 29 - Con Report
Well, Comic-Con came and went, as it does. Comics were sold, pitches were pitched, cute girls in odd costumes were observed and prodigious quantities of overpriced gin were resentfully consumed. YEAHHHHH--- it's COMIC-CON, BABY!

This year sales were, well, rather terrible, though they picked up a bit on Sunday, God bless. Thanks to all who came by and helped a brother out by dropping a few coins in the tin cup! Gracias, folks! Thanks also to the creators of the Square app for iPhone; had that thing not existed, the selling picture would have been seriously gloomy. As it was it was merely irking.

On the positive side, I think it was a better con this year than last. Last year had an oppressive vibe, tens of thousands of people overcrowded and frustrated, anger and irritation misting over the crowd like the stink of a comic convention with wholly inadequate air conditioning. I don't know what was different this year, maybe the lack of huge movie events, perhaps invisible behind-the-scenes changes enacted by the Con organizers, but people actually seemed to be having a good time. I saw smiles. Kids were running around oohing and ahhing with wonder and delight. Perhaps folks weren't as disposed to drop mid-sized amounts of cash on a humble flower cartoonist and his amazing, groundbreaking strip collections, but they were enjoying themselves.

I'd also like to direct a shout to my table neighbors Keith Knight (The K Chronicles, The Knight Life, think) as well as Lonnie Millsap (My Washcloth Stinks)
and Ken Tanaka (Everybody Dies).
Ken's book was a particular hit, charming the bucks out of all who beheld it, and his energetic carny hucksterism was an inspiration and constant goad. Good con, lads! Let's do it again sometime!

Cartoon
Ah yes. I've got a Bob the Angry Flower cartoon for you folks. It is

Captain of the Americas
The damn thing premiered at Comic-Con, but I was too busy trying to sell books to see it. I only got around to the bloody thing last night, if you can believe it. Jolly good fun, I'd say. It's not enormously ambitious, but its modest grasp and reach are well suited to each other. Of the modern superhero films it's most comic-book like: unpretentious, simple and uncomplicated. The production design is clean, functional and occasionally impressive, Chris Evans turns in a performance not once reminiscent of his turn as the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four movies, and the action scenes are reasonably well staged and bunched towards the end of the movie. All that and a twinge of melancholy. Not a gritty re-imagining, not a self-conscious parody, it's a silly action movie and it seems to be at peace with that. Kudos.
July, 20 - Con Cornding
Howdy, y'all! I'm dropping this update a tad early in the spirit of concording. That is, concordance, which is to say things happening at the same time (I think that's what concordance means, but I admit I'm stumbling on the keyboard right this second).

The first big thing occurring this week is, well, San Diego Comic-Con. It will be happening and I intend to be right there along with it from Wednesday (July 20, today!) all the way to Sunday (July 25, five days from now).

I'm too drunk to figure out how to print out a nice little con map for where I'll be other than to say that I'll generally be in the

Same place as I've been for some four or seven years. Keep an eye out for the BTAF banner and the dude with the flower hat; you'll discover the BTAF locale and me (unless I'm snoking, which all shoud expect to be often).

Bob the Angry Flower books, long difficult to get, will be on free sale in this location during the above-mentioned span of time! Get them while they are hot! Significant and evergreen gags will be available, stuff that is just now as straight up as it ever was. Talkin' 'bout the real thing, folks, comics-style, from the past to the ongoing right-now future!

Oh Some Interested Gods
At the same time as paper books will be pushed onto haplessly lucky patrons (credit card orders now taken!), the other thing I've been spending time on will be exploding in my absence. I talk of course about

the exciting new PopCap Facebook game just now out and open to all who care to fly!

Thus
For those who read this remotely, read and enjoy. Ideally, click and play the PigUpness. For those who read remotely with intention to be at the Comical Con, read, enjoy, remember and drop by.

The ultimate is this: Bob the Angry Flower books will be available at Small Press Area, K16, Ailse 1400 all con long, and the co-creator of Pig Up! will be in exactly the same place for exactly the same length of time.

Credit card sales will be!!!

And what's the cartoon? Simply this, you people without emotions:

FEEL SOMETHING, DAMMIT!
Fri, Jul 15-- Whuff
I've probably used "Whuff" as an update title in the past. I've been in many Whuff moments before and I expect to be in many in the future. "Whuff" is a general term, one meant to express an inexpressible emotional reaction of both excitement and horror, hope and fear... the kind of sound you make when no other sound sounds right. Maybe you've been there.

Why Whuff? Ahhhhh... soon, readers, soon. So close. I am held to silence for reasons that make sense to many, sometimes even me. It's all part of that inexpressibility I discussed earlier. But hang in, dear readers, hang in, and all will be expressed, said, explained and URLs provided.

Anyway! What does the above burbling have to do with this week's update and the cartoon posted within? Happily the answer is nothing. And so with little further ado, I present

Fri, Jul 8 - The Bar Eats You
This is one of them times when you look around and discover you jest got eaten by the bar. And when I say "you," I really mean "me,"
in that the bar has eaten me fully and left behind neither bones nor bloodspatters nor even a shoe. No, this time the only thing the bar left behind was

Fri, July 1 - Canadian Day!!!
I am saddened that I, a Canadian, will not be surrounded by Canadian soil and Canadian humanfolk on Canadian Day. Nonetheless, I solidly expect Canadians so blessed will be able to enjoy their righteous holiday in my absence.

But weep not for me, friends, weep not. Busy pleasures present themselves to this Canadian soul. I have bags full of happiness and solid satisfaction to sustain me in this arid weekend of un-Canadianness. As it happens sometimes Canadians must go abroad, must bring the Canada to all those Canada-benighted lands that are not Canada. We do it with pride and courage and topped-up levels of Canadian belligerence to spread the C-word. Or I do, at least.

What am I getting at? Surprisingly little. I'm just typing for a bit to make this update look like something with some thought rather than a single image linked to a cartoon. But y'all have found me out, so I'll rebut with

This week: greyscales!Fri, Jun 24 - Far far far too late
If I had any kind of sensible Web 2.0 schedule, I'd have posted this five days ago. But as regular readers of this site --those of whom who still exist-- know, angryflower.com has never been about 2.0s or sensibilities. All down the line it's been about abominably outdated web page design and regularly updated cartoons, even if the cartoons in question are 4 days past their due date. Very much like the following:

Fri, Jun 17 - Almost There
This time of year is always bittersweet for me. It's great to be on the runup to the longest day of the year, but I can never dispell the onrush of autumn lurking in my mind, waiting to spring the moment we pass the solstice. As I've heard it said, autumn is coming.

Fan Labour
I spell labor "labour" above in solidarity with my Canadian brothers and sisters battered by a senseless hockey loss. Fellow Canadian citizens, this u's for you.

To the purpose, I wanted to let y'all know that a self-described huge fan went ahead and animated a Bob strip and then posted it to YouTube. It's called Bob the Angry Flower Tribute! and if you're curious I strongly counsel a swing by the link to check it out. Who can guess the title of the strip?Fri, Jun 10 - Well Then
I hope everyone enjoyed X-Men: First Class as much as I did, which was quite a bit. I admit I responded to simple pleasures, hearing Kevin Bacon drop crisp German and then Magneto forcing French and Spanish (with subtitles!) on his enemies. As a Facebook friend mentioned, it elevated the whole proceedings.

It was bad to see the black dude ejected from the story 9 minutes after he appeared and the Hispanic girl launched from the good guys swiftly after as though from an unspoken edict from above declaring the X-Men had to be whitest. That aspect was not cool.

Most other aspects, however, succeeded, from McAvoy's insouciant forehead-tapping privilege through Fassbender's multilingual learning curve to Mystique's frantically aimless and searching sexuality. X-Men First Class maintains focus among a good solid handful of characters just as Thor's focus falls apart four minutes in. Solid effort, though, Branagh, and I'm eager to see you give it anothe shot with a story not built around the main guy's naptime!

Anyway...
With little additonal ado, here's this week's Bob cartoon

Fri, Jun 3 - Xmenxmenxmen!
I'm actually really pumped about this new X-Men movie. Sure, the last couple have been abominable, but a new cast and no Wolverine bode well. Boding even better is Matthew Vaughn, whom regular readers of this site would know
I adore ever since he dropped Kick-Ass on us last year. Throw in a period setting and some hot chicks and I think we have a winner. Early reviews seem to support this hope, so we'll see.

Anyway, you came here for a cartoon, not a pre-movie gush, and so I now present

Fri, May Two Seven in a Base Ten Thingy
Golly, another Thursday night rolls around finding me again too plastered to even attempt to do a proper update.
If only gin didn't taste so awful!!!

Anyway, a cartoonistic amusement of sortsMay 20, 2011 - Okay, Yes
I'll get around to talking about Thor eventually, but tonight it's late and I just wanna feed you folks

May 13, 2011 - Thor?
Alas, not enough people made their way to Thor before I can feel comfortable declaiming loudly and spoilery on my site about my impressions. Got on it, folks! In my stead this time we refer all inquires to the

Additional
I'm afraid I'm far too liquored to responsibly post in a public forum, but I will note that game-sound recording sessions can be very amusing!

Also
Michael Bolton rockets into my heart from the abyss of nonexistence with his efforts in this catchy piece.
Fri, May 6 - THOR!!!!
Okay, I admit I haven't seen Thor yet, and I'm not even sure if I'll see it today, given work-related efforts that are likely to take fun precedence. Still, for all those who perhaps agreed with the sentiments backhandly presented in Mjolnir, I think we can all agree this thing is going to be awesome and will have something that looks like a giant robot but is actually a giant suit of armor infused with some kinda wacky Asgardian god energy or something. Give me it now.

Anyway, in the current spirit of doing cartoons or posting remarks about things long past cool, I direct your attention to

I did this comic only because a couple of weeks ago I happened across a pair of Starcraft strategy guides. Being able to survey in brief the majestic sweep of Starcraftness in only a few dozens of handfuls of pages rather than having to earn knowledge by spending countless hours playing the damn thing, I firmly dig it. Described as "the best computer game of all time," Starcraft presents a vision of such finely tuned game balancing that it essentially serves as prima facie evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. I don't give a crap about sports, but watching Starcraft bouts with commentary is fast becoming an obsession, so in that spirit I give links to afewenjoyablematches. And by "enjoyable", I mean interesting if you have the slightest clue what the hell is going on; otherwise it's a bunch of YouTube videos depicting blurry computer graphics moving around. But if you get it, seriously folks... gripping.

The Will of the People
We went ahead and had our election in Canada last Monday, and as a man once wrote, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. Drinking heavily at the Chateau Lacombe in Edmonton on Election Night and seeing monstrously historic gains for the NDP, it should have been a heady vortex of hoarse happy screaming and uninvited hugs. Instead, Canada also saw the arrival of a Conservative majority government, thereby muting most celebratory impulses. Sure, we've had Conservative majorities before, but we haven't had any like this, ghouls shrieking to recover the glory days of the American Bush administration
at a time when Republicans won't admit the years between 2000 and 2008 even happened. As my good friend and colleague Fish Griwkowsky points out in this week's column for See Magazine, Canada now enters a shadowed new realm of polarization. Gone for four years are the reliable good sense and general consensus of the typical Canadian landscape; we now face stark and irrevocable diverging paths into the future.

Nonetheless,
I spoke of hope on Election Night and I've done it as well on Facebook, saying "if there's anything the NDP is good at and has plenty of experience in, it's being the opposition. Better us than the Liberals with a Harper majority. We'll win the war of ideas in a country where we take such wars seriously." I just hope I'm right.
Fri, April 29 - Election!
For non-Canadian readers, I've got a bombshell for you: the Canadian federal election is next Monday. Crazy, right? You'd think there would've been some mention of it somewhere, a remark in passing, some tiny hint that politcal gamboling was afoot in the CanaSphere. I certainly would've thought so, but no. Had I not friends in Canada on Facebook, I would have sailed through the next week and beyond never knowing the minority government had fallen and been replaced by another minority Conservative government.
What's Canada gotta do to get noticed down here? Legalize gay marriage? Done it. How about pot? Pretty much done that too. What's left? It's gonna have to be Gamera. Gamera or Son of Kong.

Anyway, none of that has anything whatever to so with this week's strip, but fear not. This week's strip has something to do with... last week's strip! Or the week before, if you want to get all "correct" about it. Enjoy!

Thor
is going to be awesome. Yes it is. Silence, doubters!
Earlier UpdatesInterested in earlier updates? Here they are!